Symbian in Motion

Tips & Tricks: Removing Themes

by Zach at 2:46 am | January 12th, 2007 | Category: Tips & Tricks

Before I get started on this entry, I’d like to give a big thanks to Tommi at Nokia for mentioning me on his blog. Tommi works in the s60 application development unit at Nokia and pens what is surely the most widely read s60 blog on the net: Tommi’s S60 Applications Blog. I’m sure that you already subscribe and read it religiously but if you don’t, you should! S60.blogs.com gives us all a great insight into the minds of various Nokia team members and provides constant information on the many events and developments that surround the s60 ecosystem. So thanks Tommi!

With that, I’ll move on to the first “Tips & Tricks” installment of my blog. Every so often I will provide what I hope to be some useful information that will help you get the most out of your s60 3rd device. I’ll also try to cover some of the topics that I see constantly questioned on the forum over at mobile9.com and elsewhere. One such topic is a problem that appears to be common to all s60 3rd devices.

Many people have experienced a bug where they will install a theme on their device but when they try to remove it using the Application Manager there is no entry for it. I still see this problem on the latest N80IE firmware and on newer firmware for other devices as well. Don’t despair though, as long as you install your themes to your memory card there is an easy way to remove those unwanted themes.

1. Connect your device to your PC in ‘Mass storage’ mode - or insert your Mini SD card into a card reader and connect it to your PC.

2. Once your PC recognizes your card a new drive will appear under ‘My Computer’. Open it, and browse to \private\10207114\import.

3. Browse through each of the folders in this directory to find the theme you would like to remove. The MBM, MIF, and SKN files in each folder should each be named after the theme - so if you want to remove a theme called “MyTheme”, look for “MyTheme.mbm” etc.

*Note that you may see some MBM/MIF/SKN files named simply “themepackage.mbm” etc. In this case, simply open the SKN file in Notepad and you will see the actual theme name in the first few lines of text. Here is an example:

In the example you can see that the actual name of the theme is N80 Simplified v2 (created by teddymustupo).

4. Once you’ve found the folder containing the theme files you’d like to remove, simply delete the contents of the folder (don’t delete the folder itself).

Now put your card back in your phone you’ll notice that the theme is no longer listed under themes and you’ve freed up some space on your memory card.

Note that in newer devices, theme folders/files are located in two different directories: [!:\private\10207114\import] and [!:\resource\skins] - delete the like-named folders from each directory to remove themes.

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