PaulSpoerry.com

If you haven’t checked out SPB Mobile Shell 2.0 you really should. It provides a cool “Now” screen (first screenshot below), which is similar to the Windows Today Screen except that it’s a more refined “immediate” window into your current activities. One of my favorite new additions is the beefed up contacts. You have photo contacts, but when you click on one you get a very finger friendly list of ways to contact them (second screenshot below). Mobile Shell 2.0 also introduces gestures so that you can access the mobile shell panes from any application and get real time previews of them (third screenshot below).  That’s just the tip of the iceberg, there’s much more under the hood but I won’t go into detail on that here.

So that all sounds pretty sweet right. One thing is lacking, it’s not really all that customizable. You can change the color scheme (or make it match your existing scheme) but you can’t change the icons, or re-arrange a whole lot. I imagine a lot of that is by design… Mobile Shell is meant to be very easy to use an intiutive, they didn’t overload it with a boatload of customization abilities to keep it simple. But… power users are power users and they of course see the awesome potential and want to trick it out. Enter the amazing folks at XDA developers. They’ve figured out how the whole thing is put together and started hacking away.

What you get are program screens that look like these:

As well as tricked out now screens that look like this:

Wanna find out more… hit up XDA. I imagine many more threads will jump out but here’s the main one thread now. Here’s a direct thread on how to remove the top 12 pinned icons from your Launcher and center the 6 grid launcher. Personally I don’t mind the “quicklaunch”, I’ve pinned a bunch of often used apps up there and find that pretty useful. Want I want to know how to do is replace the bottom buttons (in the last image above) with the HTC style icons. I’ve seen images of people who have done it, but I haven’t figured it out… yet.