**moved to the Media Section**

I have *my* thoughts on this, I would rather see our fine theme 'xperts have to say...

I would think that the big theme might make the phone run slower, but I am not an expert in any way. I have noticed that depending on the OS, some third party themes make the phone run extremely slow in comparison to one of the stock themes that comes on the phone.

Now this is my thought on the topic...yes the larger theme would cause the phone to lag when you first install the theme but once you get it stored in the memory then it shouldn't. Yes it will take up more free memory BUT that wouldn't cause that much of a difference in the memory if you had say a few themes...now if you had a ton of themes in various sizes and it is resulting in like say 10 themes with each totaling a lot of memory then sure it will use up your memory for the programs to be able to use that memory.

If you notice when you switch themes/restart your phone your BB will slow down for a bit, that's because it is putting all the information back into the stored memory for your phone to be able to read and access...I don't know exactly how the BB memory management works but from my experience with anything else it will be slow in the beginning to store all the required things in the memory so that it will be able to display/read/etc everything. When you look at the size of the Dimension themes they are tiny compared to anything with custom icons or anything that changes from the stock look. Icons are the biggest memory hog when it comes to themes, then you have svg's (today+ dock, scrolling, etc)...both combined will make a large theme.

Icons are the big hog? So if I make a theme using the stock icons, it will be smaller in size? What about recolored stock icons?

First, let me say that this thread title is strong with innuendo.

I have been through many themes, on my Bold and on my 8700 and 83xx devices. I have seen very little lag or slow-down on my Bold and occasional slowdown on the other devices. In the case of the devices before the Bold, there was no evidence that the themes were the direct cause of the issue. As for the Bold, I have seen very brief slowdowns on themes that had heavy amounts of animation and custom icons.

imho, themes have a minimal impact to devices, especially when you consider the number of apps that are installed on the average BlackBerry, and how many of the "poll" for data, or run random updates in the background.

I have noticed that on a lot of third party themes, while texting, if you hit the symbol key, there is often a huge lag, and it stays while you have that screen open, and until you close it.

The Bold can handle a very heavily graphic/animation theme...take a look at some animated theme for the Curve and Pearl...lags and slows down the phone big time (I have used the Snow globe theme first hand to be able to tell). I have started working on the Hiding Today Plus dock and before I started trimming down the fat of the svg it was slowing the phone's performance down. And when I switched to the non svg theme it sped right up and had no problems. This is all coming from my phone that I haven't added any programs or anything new on it for weeks and use it heavily during the day so I can see the difference between themes that I have made when it comes to content of the theme.

thanks to the Bold Biga** processor it can handle big themes...

I loaded one theme to my 8330 that was about 800kb and it almost crashed my phone!!! even though I had more than 22mb on my memory...

My recomendation, load themes that aren't that big and delete the ones you don't use...

So... as in everything, "size matters"?

It really sounds that way. I am using a tiny stock modified theme from BCollins, and there is absolutely no lag whatsoever on it. Most of the theme is stock, I would say about 90% of it is. It runs just like a regular dimension theme.

I load a theme that I made on there, which is considerably bigger, and I notice a little lag. My theme is about 450k, his is about 71k.

First it's the animations that right there can cause it to be big if the animation isn't slimmed down for the animation for the phones, second is your scrolling dock, hiding dock, those of that nature..they can be rather large in themselves depending on what you do with them. The you have the icons...making them sharp and crisp will beef up the image size....just depends on what the theme maker decides on the look of the icon.

From what I've seen as background wallpapers don't really make much of a difference, they could theoretically but when you look at the size of the image as far as screen size the image doesn't get to the point of a large wallpaper. Locations of things on the theme wouldn't make any difference. It's really just depends on the content of the theme