Notices

It's not exactly a matter of design or taste, but it seems that "dark" themes and graphics are quite fashionable for smartphones. For example, the default themes coming with the N900 are generally very dark.

I have a problem with that, and I would like to explain why. Due to the way the transflexive screen works, light themes are much, much easier to see in sunlight. You can try it yourself with the notes application, for example: black text on a white background is easy to read in sunlight. White text on a black background is much more difficult to read.

Even if you are not using the phone is sunlight, a light theme needs less backlight power to be read, thereby increasing battery life.

Of course, some people will point out that I can install a light theme, like nuvo for example. I tried that. The problem is that some applications have elements which are not changed by the theme and still display black backgrounds. Because there are few attractive light themes around, few people install them and few programmers actually test their applications with them. It's a bit a chicken and egg problem.

Notice that I said "few attractive" light themes. I don't want to criticize nuvo, it's ok, but it's not really slick. And if you check other light themes, you will find out that it is actually difficult to design one which doesn't look cartoonish or outmoded (e.g. in the "windows 3.0" design...).

I don't known a solution. Someone knows of nice "light" u.i. designs?

I can answer this, that theme wasn't even meant to look "attractive"
or anything, it was designed to closely emulate the look of Windows OS:s from the 90's.

It would be a cool feature if the front camera would notice a sudden light change and automatically change your theme to a light one. So if you walk outside it changes, maybe even gradually

Unfortunately we cannot make themes for N900 that has a blank white or even close to white background since there are some native applications that has hardcoded white fonts. Calendar is a good example; there's many white texts and you HAVE to use dark background to have those things readable.

Nokia should definitely hildonize those few apps in the phone that doesn't follow theme's font coloring.