Last week I had the pleasure of receiving a BlackBerry Torch 9810 for review. The full work-up is forthcoming, but in the meantime I’d like to start sharing some tips from the newest incarnation of the BlackBerry operating system, BlackBerry 7. It’s really just a small evolution of BlackBerry 6, but it’s souped up a bit. There are simply tons of little tips and tricks that go along with it, so if you’re going to get a new BlackBerry, or you just want to see what’s up with the latest and greatest, check out the series of tips we’ll run in the next few weeks. First up is one of my favorite new features, the ability to remove panels from your home screen. 
We’re starting off with a pretty easy one, and one that we knew was coming at that. But that doesn’t make it any less awesome. If you want to remove panels from your home screen, go to Options, and then Display. Click into Home Screen Preferences and you’ll see a familiar screen. It’s hwere you can change your wallpaper, typing preferences (universal search or shortcuts), and downloads folders. But in OS 7 there’s an added field: Home Screen Panels. Click Manage Panels and you’ll see a screen like the one in the screenshot. I’m pretty good with using just the All tab, so I can pare mine down a ton. For example, to me Favorites and Frequent are redundant, so I can just skip favorites and let my frequently used apps speak for themselves. The Media panel gets little use, either, so it goes bye bye. Since I can manage my downloads from the All tab I can get rid of that one, too. That leaves just All and Frequent. With a little folder work, that’s completely workable. The beauty is that you can let this work however you want it. Want all of the panels to stay? Cool. Want to remove just one? Do it. It just adds to the customization experience, which I’ve found to be quite good with the new OS.
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Hey! Thanks for this post. I have a fairly new (within the past week) BB Bold 9930. Today I noticed that the home screen now has TWO rows of icons, even in the “ALL” collapsed mode (which usually just has one row). I didn’t make any changes to config, so I assume this happened when I placed the phone in my pocket without locking the keyboard. BUT, I wonder how one goes about modifying the number of rows of icons on the home screen in OS 7. Any ideas? Thanks!
Josh,
not sure if you’ve solved this yet but this is from another thread:
position your finger over the blue bar above the rows or trays and slide it down until you have just the rows you want – you can make it 0 rows, 1, 2 or 3. Hope this helps you.
THANK YOU Alan. I have tried to resolve this for weeks, even Verizon Tier 2 tech couldn’t figure this out, to the point where they sent me a new BB thinking it was a software issue of how to show no rows of icons. THANK YOU.
I’ve customised my home screen as much as I possibly can. I like panels, don’t know why… I must say, I wish I could add my own panels, in addition to the default ones…