Jump through hoops to enable gray theme on your HTC Windows Phone

By Daniel Rubino
last updated

Have time on your hands and want add a unique yet mediocre theme ("accent color") to your HTC device? Well, as you can see above I overwrote my Blue theme for a gray one. (I actually had no idea it would over-write the Blue theme, otherwise I would have chosen Brown).

Of course, gray is just one of many possible themes one could do, so this was more conceptual than anything. The story of it goes back to XDA, involves TouchXplorer (a file explorer for unlocked HTC devices) and a provisioning trick detailed by xbodmod. We won't go into all the details because to be honest, it's way more effort than it's worth, unless you have some gray fetish.

ChevronWP7 was saying they would have some sort of solution to adding or changing themes, something that was presumably easier, but so far that hasn't happened and we're not holding our breath. Finally, while an all-black theme sounds bad-ass, it's actually not so great. Best bet here: just wait for your carrier and/or Microsoft to give some more "themes".

Update: Neowin has a nice step by step tutorial (opens in new tab) on the matter.

Source: XDA 1 (opens in new tab), 2 (opens in new tab); via mobilitydigest (opens in new tab)

Daniel Rubino
Daniel Rubino
Editor-in-chief

Daniel Rubino is the Editor-in-chief of Windows Central, head reviewer, podcast co-host, and analyst. He has been covering Microsoft since 2007 when this site was called WMExperts (and later Windows Phone Central). His interests include Windows, laptops, next-gen computing, and for some reason, watches. Before all this tech stuff, he worked on a Ph.D. in linguistics, watched people sleep (for medical purposes!), and ran the projectors at movie theaters because it was fun.

2 Comments
  • Dark colors do look good on the metro UI, hope MS just adds more or adds the ability to set a custom color with the same sorta system they have in place for windows media player. Also if/when they let us set a background for the start screen they should also toss in a transparency option for tiles as well.
  • Hope they do something for a Samsung Focus! I'm bored with the basic theme colors.