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It’s time again for your bi-weekly helping of premium BlackBerry themes. This week we’ve got new designs from two of our favorite theme developers, Hedone Design and Elecite. They both brought the goods, releasing two excellent, standout themes. I go through a lot of these in order to write this feature, and it seems that while there are a lot of developers that do go out of their ways to create something new and fresh, these two accomplish it regularly. And now I’ll stop gushing and get to the themes.

Read the rest of Theme Review Wednesday: Explicit, Clarion…

We’ve gotten to the point of theme design where nearly every new theme comes with certain features. While with older operating systems users had a choice of a Zen, L, TodayPlus, etc., theme, nowadays we see many of those forms lumped into a single theme. TodayPlus has turned into a less-intrusive preview, so many more developers have included it. We’ve also seen formerly static icons — battery, signal, clock — start to open corresponding applications. I think it’s given theme developers a lot more to work with. We’ll see some of those features at work this week.

Read the rest of Theme Review Wednesday: BusyStyle, Pulse, TiltBerry…

Do you like themes that sacrifice function for visual pleasure? How about themes that do the opposite? What about themes that appear to be simple and aesthetic, but really pack a ton of functionality? What about themes that look like workhorses but actually pack a visual punch? We’re covering all the bases this week on Theme Review Wednesday, taking you through three themes that we’ve found particularly awesome.

Read the rest of Theme Review Wednesday: Quatro, !Reflect7, Keen…

Hunting for new BlackBerry themes has become a new joy to me. When we started doing the theme review feature, I kind of slogged along, dreading the bi-weekly ritual of finding and then testing themes (made even harder when I had an incompatible device and have to borrow). That changed recently, and now I enjoy reading about new themes on different sites and then loading them up. As you can see, we’ve strayed from the usual suspects — well, sometimes — and have started to feature a number of different theme developers. This week we’re hitting on a new favorite, Elecite, and one we haven’t hit before, Ninja. And then there’s Hedone design, but it’s expected that we’ll review new themes when they create ‘em.

Read the rest of Theme Review Wednesday: Heart Chick, Halcyon, BerryShell…

Whenever I prepare for our bi-weekly theme review, I find myself hitting a few sites regularly. We always review Hedone Design themes, and it’s a rarity this week that they’re not included. Another regular stop is Cherri Chiodo’s All Things Berry. When I visited her site recently to check out her new themes, I learned some bad news. Her daughter has been diagnosed with Retroperitoneal Undifferentiated Sarcoma, and has been undergoing chemo and radiation treatment. So, before we dive into the theme reviews this week, I’d like to offer my thoughts and prayers to Cherri, her daughter, and her family. No one deserves to go through this.

Read the rest of Theme Review Wednesdays: Liquid, Transfixion, Classique Docked…

In an attempt to expand the theme developers we feature in this bi-weekly space, I’ve started to search out new ones on my own. This has yielded positive results this week — though we do feature one of our regulars. I’ll continue noting any new themes I cross in my BlackBerry travels, but this works better when crowd sourced. If you are a theme developer looking to have your themes featured, or if you’re just a regular BlackBerry user who has found an excellent theme, email me, jpawlikowski at bbgeeks, and I’ll take a look. Hopefully my efforts mesh well with yours, and we can put together some killer theme features. Now, onto this week’s crop.

Read the rest of Theme Review Wednesdays: Circles, SnowTime, Mord…

Every once in a while we like to add a theme to our BlackBerry theme reviews. We did this for Halloween themes back in October, and now it’s time to do up another set of holiday themes for December. Looking around for these themes I found mostly Christmas themes, but I did come by one Hanukkah theme — and best of all, that one is free.

Read the rest of Theme Review Wednesdays: Holiday edition…

Since we started doing our bi-weekly theme feature, the format has been the same. Pick three themes, grab a screenshot from each, and describe what’s going on. That usually works well enough, because there’s always a link where you can see more screen shots. Many themes these days, though, come with demo videos. So, instead of a 200×150 image of the home screen this time around, we’ll embed the video for each theme after a brief description. If you’re a fan of this feature (and I realize not everyone is), let me know which format you like better.

Read the rest of Theme Review Wednesdays: Video edition…

BlackBerry themes have been a prominent topic this week. It started on Wednesday when, as we do every other week, we reviewed three premium BlackBerry themes. Two of these were created using BlackBerry Theme Studio 5.0, so yesterday we went over how to create your own BlackBerry theme. I kiddingly urged someone to make me a custom theme, but I think I’ve found something to keep me occupied for a bit. Via BBCool, I found out that Bplay has launched a series of themes for cities around the world. Yeah, I’m totally getting the New York one, pictured below.

Read the rest of A BlackBerry theme for every city…

As mentioned in yesterday’s theme review post, RIM recently released BlackBerry Theme Studio, an application which allows anyone to create new BlackBerry themes. While we’ll always appreciate the work of the professional designers who create vibrant premium themes, we also know that many people have an idea for the perfect theme in their heads. I know I do. There have been a few themes that have come close to that, but none have been the perfect Joe Theme. If you’ve been longing for your own perfect theme, and you have some time on your hands, you can now give it a try.

Read the rest of Create your own themes with BlackBerry Theme Studio…