May 23, 2011 17:41 GMT  ·  By

BlackBerry users interested in new ways to personalize their smartphones have now at their disposal a new application specifically created for that, namely the BlackBerry Theme Studio 6, available for free with increased ease of use.

For those out of the loop, we should note that the BlackBerry Theme Studio comes as a suite of tools, such as Theme Builder, which should offer users the possibility to create themes, or the BlackBerry Composer, for coming up with animations and graphics for themes.

These tools have been created to offer users the possibility to customize almost all aspects of their themes, such as backgrounds, sound effects and ringtones, icons, menus or fonts. Animations and screen transitions can be easily thrown into the mix as well.

The application is available for those interested in coming up with professional themes as well, and some of these creations are already available for download via the BlackBerry App World storefront.

As RIM notes, the application portal includes a great deal of themes, around 20 percent of the total number of entries.

The new BlackBerry Theme Studio flavor comes with a nice range of new features, and was meant to enable users come up with themes for their devices even easier than before.

Some of the main changes in the application would include:

- A new user interface for BlackBerry Theme Builder that lets you click on any item on the preview screen and directly edit its settings. This allows for faster editing and a shorter learning curve. Plus, you can select multiple items to change all at once.

- The Background Wizard makes it easy to add dynamic wallpapers to your theme. Options include date-based or time-based changes (to highlight a special holiday or change images by the time of day), and slideshow backgrounds (to cycle through your favorite photos).

- New productivity features allow you to batch update all of the graphics in a theme automatically. You can also change fonts across multiple phone screens automatically. Also, BlackBerry Theme Studio continues to be compatible with popular graphic design tools such as Adobe Photoshop and Corel Paint Shop Pro.

- For our professional theme designers, a new “export” option makes it simple to offer themes through BlackBerry App World. The “export” option is designed to package all of the selected files and settings into a single zip file, ready for upload to BlackBerry App World.

The new version of the software also comes with support for some of the latest BlackBerry smartphones and software, the company notes.

This would include support for handsets like BlackBerry Torch 9800 and BlackBerry Style 9670 smartphones, as well as for a series of BlackBerry 6 UI elements, such as the graphic content menus.

The new BlackBerry Theme Studio 6 is available for download from Softpedia as well, via this link.