Welcome to the HTC theme of the week, a series where I spotlight a theme I’ve found in the HTC Theme app, from a user I follow, a recommended theme, or eventually ones I’ve made myself. The Themes app runs on phones with HTC Sense 6 or higher and has a huge gallery of user contributed designs with custom wallpapers, icons, sounds and more.
This week’s theme is called DarkNex, it has a material design with very crisp colors, wallpapers, and well designed icons which add up to a stellar theme worthy of review. There are lots of positive things to say about this theme. It’s simple, but also very detailed and there’s only one problem I had overall.
DarkNex theme pros
The DarkNex theme has one really nice wallpaper (two if you have something newer than the One M8) and the color scheme goes well with the custom icons. There’s the basic clock and weather widget plus a handful of custom icons for HTC and popular apps like Evernote.
One thing that stood out to me more than other themes in the past was the bar across the top of the app tray, phone dialer, and SMS window. I’ve noticed this as being skinned on other themes, but this one has a different wallpaper all together which made it stand out even more to me.
DarkNex theme cons
Like I said earlier, there’s only one thing that didn’t make the cut for me and it is the custom sounds. The notification tone for instance, it lasts a good 30 seconds per incoming message. While I like to know when I get a new message I don’t want to bother myself by having to react each time I get a message. Mainly, I would have to clear the message on my phone to get the tone to stop. I would rather have a tone that is loud with a few beeps and this was loud enough, but just kept going. I kept the tones for a day just to experience the theme in full, but I HAD to change them!
About the theme designer
Shawn Shokouhi has had a HTC phone in his hands for over 10 years, so he has a bazillion themes in the gallery and all of theme are well designed with lots of features. There are lots of custom clocks, weather, and icons in these themes and he goes the extra mile with sounds; even if some of them are lengthy.
The DarkNex theme was added to the gallery late November and has already been downloaded 10211 times. If you don’t like the DarkNex theme you should definitely take a look at the others in his gallery.
About my theme review criteria
When selecting themes to review in this column I look for themes that are complete and look like they have a lot to offer.
So what does a complete theme look like?
A complete theme has a collection of wallpapers, as many custom app icons as possible with the rest styled and/or textured, custom weather and clock icons, custom soft keys, modified keyboard, custom fonts, and unique sounds.
That’s a lot of features, but to me, that encompasses a theme with all the bells and whistles. Not all themes I review hit all the marks, but they at least have several of the items mentioned above. I do this in an effort to show you the creativity of the designers uploading to the HTC Theme app.
Theme of the Week: DarkNex
Tapping the link above on your mobile will take you to a web browser and you may need to try the following item in order to see it in the Themes app:
- After you click on the link make sure you are *logged in at the top right and then tap the bookmark button near the middle of the screen. Then, on your phone open the Themes app and scroll to the right until you get to “MY BOOKMARKS” and the theme should be listed in there. *Make sure you log into the website using the same Google account used on your phone.
- If this doesn’t work for you, try searching for it in the Themes app: There is a search bar in the Themes app, tap the 3 stacked lines in the top left. Search will be in the grey bar across the top
