Born on a cold winter day in February 2004, jw launched Symbian Themes, with a dream that it would become the internet's premier community for sharing themes for compatible smartphones. In a remarkably short period of time, his dream came true.

Now part of Mobile Themes and supporting many more devices, the site has been through three revisions, known as Iterations.

This page gives a brief history of our relatively short life online.

Iteration 1, as the name suggests, was the first ever design of Symbian Themes, and provided a very basic interface for uploading and downloading themes.

The site soon gained popularity with many themers and quickly ran out of bandwidth - the site began with a 2GB/month allowance which ran out after about 2 days!

Luckily, Rafe, the friendly administrator (who has an extremely uncanny resemblance to Harry Potter) at All About Symbian came to the rescue, generously providing the necessary bandwidth (and domain name) to keep the site going.

It was during the timeframe of Iteration 1 that it made sense to be able to share more than just themes, so wallpaper, operator logo and SmartLauncher skin sections were subsequently opened. The site was becoming an all-purpose resource for customization of S60 devices.

Everything was going perfectly, until the site's tremendous popularity proved to be its downfall yet again. The site began eating terabytes of bandwidth in a matter of hours, and this was too much for the poor old server provided by All About Symbian!

The site was forced offline for a few months, and it was during this time that jw had a rethink about how to improve the site and bring the bandwidth consumption under control.

It was decided that Iteration 1 was simply no longer suitable for this task, and the tedious task of rewriting the entire site began. The new site, Iteration 2, finally burst into action on Sunday, November 28, 2004.

Click here to see Iteration 1.

Iteration 2 was a massive change!

The site became a true online community for theme sharers, with membership accounts and a forum. In addition, geeky facilities were added such as RSS feeds, and, most controversially, download limits.

By now, the site had moved to its own dedicated server, but bandwidth usage was still an issue.

It was clear that some form of download limit had to be imposed to fix the bandwidth issue. This was a fixed limit, but there was an option for hardcore downloaders to then remove the limit by purchasing an Unlimited Download Pass - the money earned from these went towards the ever-increasing server bill.

Iteration 2 was a resounding success. A poll was run asking users to vote on whether they preferred Iteration 1 or Iteration 2. Over 90% of users preferred the new design. The site even had its own themes which changed depending on the season!

Roll on February 2005. Symbian Themes had grown up! It was one year old, and had over 4,000 themes available! At the time, no other site had anywhere near that amount of themes available for S60 smartphones.

However, jw had grown up too. The site was only ever a "hobby" with no financial gain for any of the administration. Personal commitments were eating into the time previously allocated to Symbian Themes and control of the site was eventually passed down to the All About Symbian team, until Rafe received an e-mail from jw in July, offering to come back on board and to replace Iteration 2 with a brand new site - a supersite for all mobile phone users to visit to customize their handset.

Work on the new site began immediately. It was clear that if we were to target all mobile phone users, the name "Symbian Themes" was inappropriate, and the team unanimously decided on the new name, "Mobile Themes".

Cue a brand new site design and engine...

Click here to relive the memories of Iteration 2.

Iteration 3 is the current site design that you are viewing right now and has been recoded from scratch by jw.

Now part of Mobile Themes, Iteration 3 has expanded on the community aspect of Iteration 2 with rewards, a wiki and regular competitions.

In addition, the site provides online tools for theme building, so users can now directly build and share their themes online!

The membership system was greatly enhanced with Iteration 3. Each user now has their own upload center (previously "My Symbian Themes") to view, delete and update their own creations and other members can now leave comments for each file.

Iteration 3 has also brought a world-first to the S60 platform scene - liteThemes™. Standard themes only work on S60 2nd Edition or newer devices, meaning S60 1st Edition devices (such as the Nokia 7650 and N-Gage) had been left out. Until now!

Iteration 3 will also provide users with more ways to download our files too. If you don't have a physical method of connecting your mobile device to the PC, soon you will be able to download them via SMS as well as true WAP, and the 8 million subscribers to Sky Digital in the United Kingdom will be able to browse and download our entire file library via their TV. It's an exciting time here at Mobile Themes!

The next major change to the Mobile Themes empire was the launch of S.E. Themes in May 2006. It, as the name suggests, is a portal for sharing Sony Ericsson themes. It also includes a unique exclusive facility to allow theme artists to protect their themes to stop leechers from stealing them.

However, with the launch of S.E. Themes, the site finally outgrew the server, so a second server was set up alongside the original one. Yes, Mobile Themes is so power-hungry that it needs multiple servers!

So, now you're up-to-date with our past! But what about our future? Iteration 4 is now being actively developed and if you have an idea you would like to see included, please let us know! Send us an e-mail by clicking 'Contact Us' on the menu bar at the top of the page and choose 'Suggestions'.