It’s official, nobody outside the US needs to be envious of any iPhone owner. The phone is bolted down on a network and OS level too much, that unless you’re really just using it for it’s advertised features, you’ll probably going to be disappointed once you’ve got over the whole “nice and shiny” exterior and UI.

But I will state for the record. The actual phone, as far as technology goes, has so much potential if they only open it up – which I believe will be inevitable once they got the technology down pat. The responsiveness of the interface just shows how far [and fast] a phone could go visually when you implement a “proper” kernel on it. Despite what it lacks, it is still probably the biggest capacity phone ever built. It does fairly little at this point, but what it does, it does better than anything else out on the market.

So I’ll probably be getting one come the asian release; I foresee that generation to be so much better than what the US has now. In the meantime, I’ll do the next best thing, make my smartphone look like one.

Here’s a shot of the “unlock” screen:

And those icons you see up on the first picture, they’ve been updated since that picture. I actually redid all the icons just to add consistency.

It started because the background of the buttons on the “dock” weren’t aligning well with the “metal mesh” image on the background. So I had to do something. Then I just figured since I’m doing this, might as well try to make a uniform template for everyting in case I wanted to make new buttons.

Next, we have the actual Dialpad. There was this cool Dialpad that looked like the iPhone right here, but I kinda got tired of the blowfish. Plus the actual DialPad didn’t really look like that. It had to look something similar to the picture on the right.

So I took the liberty of decompiling, modifying, and reassembling the “installer” with element images I created. These are shots of what my custom DialPad skin looks like (portrait and landscape):

Since I’m a generous person, I’m sharing the CAB file to anyone using Windows Mobile 5 on a smartphone. If you use it on WM6 it will kill your smart-dial and who knows what else, so I suggest you don’t even try it.

You can download it here. And since I’m such a nice guy, I’ve also included the iPhone ringtone set/collection in MP3 format. Personally, I use the Marimba file for my ringer and the Sonar file for my SMS notifications.

post updated on December 3, 2008 @ 7:02 am