When it comes to customization and tweaking the look of the device, both Android and iOS are ahead in the race compared to Windows Phone OS. The default metro tile look of Windows Phone is less obstructive and pleasant to the eyes, but it still lacks in offering variation to the end-users.
Windows Phone design brings ‘something different‘ factor on the table.
That said, Windows Phone bounds users to 10 color variation, limiting options to tweak the metro UI of the device. But thanks to chevronWP7 lab unlock and Windows Phone hacker team, it is now possible to create a custom theme for WP.
‘Themes for WP7‘ tool lets you deploy your own background theme onto device, provided you follow certain standards. Basically, all Windows Phone supports 480 x 800 resolution, which means that your background theme should be only 480 pixels wide.
Themes for WP
- Themes for WP7 works on all chevronWP7 unlocked Windows Phone, which was re-opened few hours back. You do not need to go through Interop unlock process in order to use this hack.
- For those who might not know, Inertop unlock gives you an access to device drivers which is only limited to Microsoft and OEMs. You need to follow the tutorials given at XDA forum to achieve this. There are loads of homebrew app available on XDA forum that needs an access to Interop codes.
- This tool also supports creation of live tile background. In simple terms, instead of applying the background image to all the tiles, you would be allowed to keep it limited to single or multiple tiles.
- Once again you’ve to take care of the dimensions of the background image. Users can use only 173 x 173 transparent PNG image as a tile background (any image editing tool will let you customize an image to this dimension). For this matter, Windows Phone Icon maker should suffice.
Note: Make sure Zune player is up and running, and your device is connected to the PC when you deploy the custom theme onto Windows Phone.
This video tutorial will walk you through the process of creating and deploying custom theme on Windows Phone.
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