Change your BlackBerry theme and homescreen options

In our three and a half years of existence, we’ve striven to uncover every nook and cranny of your BlackBerry. If you check out our BlackBerry quick tips archive you’ll find tips that cover almost every basic BlackBerry function. (And if we’re missing any, let us know.) That leaves us few places to explore. Today, though, we’ll cover something we’ve left uncovered until this point. It’s an OS 5.0 thing, just to be clear. Many of our tips involve Options screens, and this is no different. You’ll start by clicking menu, so that your applications list is on the screen. Then hit menu again and select Options. Here you’ll have a place to customize your theme, and by extension, your home screen. If you use one of your BlackBerry’s default themes, you’ll have more options on this screen. That is, you’ll be able to select a layout, whereas with custom themes that’s already set. But let’s forget the warnings and jump into this thing. The first option is wallpaper, which is self explanatory. We’ve gone over changing your BlackBerry wallpaper before, but this is a bit easier a method. Just click on it and you can select from images on your device memory or SD card. Next is layout. If you have a custom theme, there probably isn’t an option here. These are mostly set to either Zen or Today or whatever. If you use a default theme, though, you usually have a couple of options. Some custom themes do, too, but I haven’t seen it often. Just click, and as you can see in the screenshot you’ll have the option to choose among a few options. I’m a Today guy, so I’m clearly going to choose that. If you are, too, you can have the simple default theme with a little oomph. Below that you can set your downloads folder. By default it is set to the convenient Downloads, but you can change that to whatever you want. Whenever you download an app or anything from the web, it will be tucked into this folder. I usually just keep the default setting and move things around as needed. If you want to change your theme, just click menu and scroll up to Theme Options. That will bring you a list of themes installed on your device. Just click it, and then click Activate on the next screen. You can also delete custom themes here. I find this quite a bit easier than deleting themes through the applications list, since you have a visual of the theme. I’ve deleted themes in the applications list before only to realize that it was my active theme that I deleted. And finally, if you do something you didn’t want to, and don’t know how to fix it, you can just click the final option, which resets your theme options. And there you go. Now you have complete control over your BlackBerry theme and home screen.

About the Author

Joe Pawlikowski is the Senior Editor at MobileMoo.com and has been covering the mobile industry full time since 2007. When he's not writing about the tech scene, he can be found discussing his personal love - baseball (and more specifically the New York Yankees) as well as writing on his personal blog.