Smartphone Thoughts - Daily News, Views, Rants and Raves

Homescreen Designer is an amazing new tool that allows you to create WYSIWYG homescreens for your Smartphone. Ruttensoft, the company behind this great product, has just released an upgrade that fixes a couple bugs, and adds a wealth of new features. Version 1.1.4 supports more plugin, multiple lines for calendar, ability to move the icon bar, alter prefix label for carrier and email, and lots more. This is a free upgrade for anyone who has already purchased Homescreen Designer version 1.0.



Homescreen Designer requires the .NET Framework on your machine. You can download a trial or purchase a copy for $12.00 here. [Affiliate]

All of you xBar fans will be happy to know that there is a new update available. It boasts better support for the HTC Typhoon line of devices, as well as a number of fixes. Anyone with a Typhoon, might be interested in playing with the new temperature sensor feature. I have never used xBar myself. I'm waiting to see how good the task manager that comes with my next phone is before I buy it. :wink:

You can download the update here. To purchase a copy of xBar for $5.99, click here. [Affiliate]

"You can improve the performance of your SPV C500 by downloading the new ROM update. This will give you the following benefits: Videos can be sent via MMS, flickering issue in games has now been fixed, packet video full screen mode and backlight fix, improved memory management of the camera and video applications, improved browsing/upload speed (changed from GPRS class 8 to class 10)."

Paul over at MoDaCo informed me this morning that Orange has released a ROM update for their awesome C500 Smartphone. It sounds like he's been testing it for a while and says it's a stable update. Get your downloading engines fired up! I'll be updating my C500 shortly.

Good news for MPx200 and i600 owners fighting with caller ID problems! Photo Contacts 2.0 was *just* released and, as we posted previously, gets around the issue of the built in caller ID not displaying the name of a caller if you have a large number of contacts.

Here's the full list of improvements in 2.0:

• 2 new Photo Caller ID modes (SIMPLE mode displays a smaller photo, THEMED mode displays a medium sized photo)
  
• Awesome new photo adjust engine lets you crop and adjust contact photographs on the Smartphone
  
• Photo image browser lets you easily assign photos to contacts on the phone (great for camera phones). SmartName is still the preferred option for assigning many contact photos at once.
  
• SMS/MMS/Email support facilitates easy message sending through Photo Contacts
  
• Contact photos can now be sent via MMS, Email and Infrared (via PhotoBeam)
  
• Caller ID Name Override feature fixes the Caller ID bug in US based Smartphones (i600, MPX-200)
  
• Option to enable continuous ring-tones
  
• Ability to sort contacts by Company Name
  
• Photo ZOOM feature (just press * to display a large photograph of the selected contact)
  
• Incoming Call forwarding info is shown in Themed Photo Caller ID (support varies by network)
  
• Enhanced call dialog remembers the last selected number for each contact for Talk-Talk functionality
  
• Automatic auto-run at startup loads Photo Contacts in the background
  
• Enhanced support for memory cards
  
• Performance improvements across the board (everything is faster!)

Photo Contacts was a great app in 1.0 and now it looks like a must-have for American users. To make the deal even better, 2.0 is a free upgrade for anyone who purchased the previous version! You can pick this up NOW for $19.99 in our affiliate store.

Update: The free trial download has not yet been updated to version 2.0. You can use it to try out the 1.0 features, but it does not include the things listed above. We have been told that a free trial for 2.0 should be available by tomorrow.

Here are some screenshots of Photo Contacts 2.0: