Customize Your S60 Standby/Home Screen with Voyager Home Screen

Feeling bored about your standby screen on your S60 phone? Yeah, it’s very bored and not customizable. Last time I tried Handy Shell, which is a home screen replacement for the S60 phone, the application and how it works looks very cool but one problem for me using N95 is that the Handy Shell seriously lagged my phone and another down side of it is that it’s not a free application.

My previous original home screen.

Recently I found a new application that will replace your standby screen with various customization. Actually it’s out quite some times in Chinese version. It’s actually created by the Chinese and have been ported to English recently.

It added weather, Google search, a big digital clock, and a rotating news feed. The to do notes and memos are still there and it shows the number of to dos you have in your calendar instead of one in the original standby screen. Another thing I didn’t set is that it allows two rows of shortcut instead of one. I don’t really have that many shortcuts, so a row is fine for me. One row that is missing is the Share Online thing that was on the original standby screen, this is a good thing because I don’t use it and I believe many of you don’t too, another is the WLAN scanning, but you can add the WLAN wizard shortcut into the shortcut line. =)

On the original setting, the right key is actually MyFav which shows a list of your frequent used contact. I prefer having Calendar as my right shoutcut key. Pressing the red End Call keys will switch between opened background application. So let’s say you have Gravity on, you hide it, you need not to go can choose from your shortcut but instead, pressing the End Call button brings you straight into unclose app.

For the left shortcut key, it actually opens up a menu which brings to a list of shortcut again. So you actually can get a lot of shortcut with this Voyager Homescreen. One thing that bothers me is that I don’t know why my Start menu is in Chinese, maybe is the install and uninstall of different version causes this. I can read Chinese so it does fine to me. A little big translation on my Start menu, the first *key is Lock Keypad, 1. is News Feeds, 3. is Setting, 3. is More Setting and 4. is Camera.

Clicking on the weather bar brings up this 4 day weather forecast. You need to have a Internet connection for this and the rotating news feed. Setting up the weather was a little bit troublesome at first, I recommend you to use a Wifi or 3G, it just can’t detect the city when I got an EDGE connection.

Another feature that comes with it is vApp which is like a App Store built in with the vHome app. Showing some of the useful free app. This is faster than Ovi, but I didn’t really use it because I have what I want already.

Besides that, you can do smart dialing which is like on the E71. Straight dial a name and the names on the phonebook or app will show on screen. I like this feature a lot.

I also found out that the app has changed my web browser’s home screen, showing a list of shortcuts. That’s pretty good, but if I am allow to change the links of the shortcut will be nice.

One feature that is missing from the Chinese version is the social networking bar, which you can update Facebook and Twitter right from the standby screen, hopefully next update will include this.

Available for Symbian S60 v3 and it’s unsigned. So look way around to install unsigned app in your phone and have fun!

Download here.