Smartphone Homescreens

Okay, I have to 'fess up that I'm not much of a one for ringtones, homescreens, graphics and the like. Probably just my age but I quite like things "vanilla", plain and simple. In the same vein as "don't burden my car with ridiculous alloy wheels or 'spinners'" (which I fully subscribe to), I generally like to keep things original; the way they were intended.

However, a couple of things have been bugging me about my C500 (namely the awkward access to both the alarm function and the bluetooth toggle) and I found a solution in a new homescreen. The added plus (I must confess) is a very attractive new look to my C500 homescreen with great access to the phone's functionality direct from that main screen.

The first homescreen I installed (iCandy) I found at https://www.modaco.com. It takes advantage of a few plug-ins (an alarm plug-in, a bluetooth toggle plug-in, a tasks plug-in and a media-player plug-in) to provide easy access to commonly used functionality direct from the homescreen. In particular, I could now toggle Bluetooth on/off from the homescreen and check / set my alarm. What a difference to the usual nested menus I had to negotiate!

However I ran into a few problems with the iCandy homescreen (and I think a few others with C500s have had similar issues). Basically I could not get my phone to re-start; it would freeze on the startup screen. So I searched around again and found another homescreen by the same authour (crafty) on the Modaco site. This one is called Gant and I've had a lot more success with it. No lock-ups this time. I've customised the Gant.home.xml file in a couple of places to remove the email alerts and all the games links (not my cup of tea). I've found it to be excellent - particularly the alarm and bluetooth switch features. Nice one crafty!