I'm placing this one firmly in the "nerdy stuff" category. It's pretty darn nerdy, and it will only really apply to you if you have an AT&T Tilt (that's a kind of phone).

I've been playing recently with the official AT&T ROM that comes on my phone. The ROM consists of the operating system, applications, look and feel, etc. Pretty much everything but your contacts and calendar items. The AT&T official software is fast, but it's bogged down with crap and pretty darn ugly. Here's a picture of what the phone looks like when you first pull it out of the box:

See what I mean? It has no life to it, just a list of crap. It's actually a pretty decent Windows Mobile implementation - but you can't expect anything too extreme when it's designed for the masses. If you want something really hip and fashionable, you have to do it yourself.

So with the help of some people over at xda-developers.com I began work on my own ROM. This process consists of dumping the official ROM, stripping out the crap, optimizing it for better performance, adding in some applications, tweaking, re-tweaking, changing the look and feel, and on and on.

Over the past few weeks I've probably re-flashed the firmware onto my phone about 50 times. So if I missed your call, now you know why.

Here is my new ROM. I call it Blackwood because ... well, I used black wood for most of the backgrounds. Pretty creative name, huh?

This is the new boot screen when you reset the phone or first turn it on. It used to be some kind of AT&T logo with their five bars thing above it.

Panel 1: This is the home screen. I skinned a big clock with a cool dark red font and made some cool buttons to scroll between different things like weather, media, quickdial, etc.

Panel 2: This just shows the red highlight on the popup notifications.

Panel 3: Shows the Start menu with some custom programs and shortcuts like newSMS. You can see the weather screen in the back.

Panel 3-4: This is my favorite feature - the subtle battery meter. It is basically a 3 pixel wide bar at the top of the screen that shrinks as the battery runs out. It is done in such a way that it doesn't mess with the look of the phone but is there when you look for it.

Panel 1: shows "New SMS" shortcut that is mapped to the left soft key of the phone. Basically it used to take like 6 clicks to make a new text message, but now it only takes one.

Panel 2: Skinned phone dialer. I pretty much just changed the background and buttons.

Panel 3: Media browser, with the blackwood background.

Panel 4: Media player skin with a red wood background. I'm pretty proud of that one, actually.

Besides the look and feel I pretty much got rid of all the AT&T craperware (buy ringtones now!), made it run nice and fast, enabled some "locked-out" features that AT&T tries to turn off, and more.

So there you have it. Yes, I'm a big nerd and this is what I've been doing with my spare time for the last several weeks.

If you want to know more, or happen to have an AT&T Tilt, you can go here.