One of the new features in PocketPC 2002 is the ability to have themes on your today page. To find out more about themes read here. Microsoft came up with a free Theme Manager package, and currently there are two other commercial packages available.
So why would you want to spend money when there is a free package available? Well, the Microsoft package seems to do everything you need, until you try it on a new PocketPC that has 64k colours. The MS Powertoy basically degrades the image you choose in order to make it 4096 colours? Why is this bad? Well it introduces banding, for detail on this see here.
So what other choices are there?
Firstly there is a package called Pocket Theme Manager from BVRP. This product costs €14.9 EUR or $12.89 US, there is a trial download which is fully functional but inserts text on each of your themes saying: BVRP pocket Theme Manager Trial Version.
The product is easy to use and comes with a range of themes already created, or you can create your own from scratch. Like the Microsoft package the editor is fully WYSIWYG, in that menu colours, drop down menus etc can all be edited and viewed on screen before you download to your PocketPC. It took me no time at all to create the theme above, then download it onto my PocketPC.
The unique feature about this product is that it allows 3 kind of optimisation dependent on the amount of colours your PocketPC can display. The three choices aer 4096 colours, 64,000 colours or no optimisation.
The product also allows you to set various transparency levels, rotate and invert images, as well as use a section of an image if it is too large for the PocketPC screen.
I have read on a couple of sites that people were having problems using the BVRP software however on Windows 2000 it installed first time, and all the themes appeared on my PocketPC as I wanted them to, so I have had no problems at all with this software. I also was able to open a .tsk file created with BVRP within the MS Theme Manager.
The other commercial product is the Xircuit Theme Generator which costs USD 14.95. A 7 day trial version is available. Once again the product is easy to use, it is not quite WYSIWYG in that you need to click the preview button in order to see how the menu/text colours will look.
Main screen: 
Preview screen: 
The unique features of this product are the multitude of effects you can add to your images including mosaic, rotate, sharpen, soften, brightness / contrast adjustments and many more including transparency. You can also create themes in portrait and landscape modes. This also has a 'generate 24 bit' option for themes.
Unfortunately this product gave me the most trouble. The first theme I generated wouldn't load on my PocketPC. When I went back into XTG it said that it wasn't a valid theme. I then re-created the theme, and told XTG to build and install the theme, and once again it wouldn't load. XTG then crashed on me.
On re-opening I was once again told that my new theme wasn't valid. Whatever I do I can't seem to get it to save a valid theme. This is on Windows 2000 trying to install to an iPAQ 3850.
In summary then if you have a 4096 colour PocketPC the Microsoft tool is fine. If your PocketPC can handle more colours I suggest you look at these other two packages. Based on my experience the BVRP product is the one to go for.
If you don't want to create your own themes then these sites have a stack of freely downloadable themes:
http://www.pocketthemes.com/
http://www.pocketpcthemes.com/
copyright Greg Hilton 2001
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