Once you did some nice job, the expectations of people and you yourself increase forcing you to do better. I received a review copy of carla v2 theme by Blade which is now published at nokia store. This is a top class, high quality theme after which the developer (Blade) claims that you would start loving your phone (interface). Let’s see what is the reality and why would you love this theme?
Actually Blade, moderately popular theme designer, is well-known for his Elegance (series of six themes) and Symbian Developers official themes.
As an emerging developer, blade designed Carla (V1) on June 2012. Carla was a beauty but lacked a lot of things like third party icons and some sort of element customizations. At the moment, IND190, Adelino, Raffa, Daeva112 have made such a trend that users feel cheated if the theme has less number of customised third party icons. Daeva112′s REA and EVA, IND190′s iBoss, Adelino’s Gemma icon packs and Raffa’s cool themes consists a large number of third party icons. Blade is nowhere less to them. Elegance was a success saga for him but the best what he got was from Symbian Developers 2, which topped the free theme category at Nokia Store.
carla v2 is purely different from all themes on the platform . Actually I have been a tester of this theme in earliest days of its development and I saw it improving day by day. Keyboard was edited almost six times and elements thrice. carla v2 is aimed to be a perfect theme, in terms of both number of icons as well as the customization of elements.
As a hardcore mobile user and due to regular messaging, I care about the keyboard, dialer and wallpaper at first. This theme got one of the best keyboard elements ever. A dark brown user interface of keyboard is highly suitable for both day and night use. The character preview is very sweet as dark blue color pop-up rises on each tap with black text in it. The shift button is smart enough and looks pretty and distinct to other keys. The gap between two characters on the keyboard is finely balanced and this balance doesn’t bother you while typing.
Dialer has a perfect combination of Dark Grey and Dark Blue colors. Buttons are rectangly curated and no annoying gimmicks or shines are there.
Personally I don’t like abstract wallpapers but universally many does. This theme includes a dark high quality geometric wallpaper at default. Good for me, this theme is amazing with custom wallpapers too. With almost transparent menu-bar, you can enjoy any kind of wallpaper on your phone.
Now, let’s talk about themed-icons. Inspired from popular anna styled icons, this theme features about a thousand customized third party icons in colorful grunge style. Colors in each customised icon are chosen wisely. Colors are neither too shiny nor much grunged. Those are light, vibrant and stunning in look and easily viewable in all kind of light situations. Moreover, the icons are light weighted and don’t slow your phone. The menu background is flexible and it adopts the wallpaper you set on homescreen. After menu, when you open system apps like messaging, settings or some third party apps like Whatsapp, Nimbuzz, QCal Nitro etc. you will find that the background this theme uses is nested black, excellently designed with customised phone elements.
Seems like the developer has worked very hard on Music Player and Video Player customizations. Theme uses dark background with shiny dark buttons in music player and rounded tiny white play/pause, forward and backward buttons in Video Player. It’s very nice to see that the developer has focused so brilliantly even on micro elements of the theme.
A lot of work has been done on toggle bar a.k.a notification bar. All elements on notification bar are customised.
Some fabulous work has been done with web and popup elements too. For the beauty, this theme uses dark blue highlights when making texts.
To end this small review of carla v2, I will say only one sentence. If this theme is not perfect then it is nor even less than any themes on Symbian platform. This is a must have theme, if you like to put innovations and darkness to your phone.
You may download/buy this theme at price tag of $1.99 or INR10 via Nokia store using following link.
store.ovi.com/content/318941
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