The new app called WP7 Launcher Lite began as a project featured in - where else? - the XDA Developer forums. Created by forum member TheRedDrake, the goal was to produce something that would provide "the freedom of Android and the grace and elegance of Windows Phone 7." Now a Lite (free) version of that application is available on the Android Market for you to try. And there are other plenty of other apps that bring you a similar experience, too. We've listed a few of these below.

The free version of WP7 Launcher, which was just released to the Android Market, allows you to get a taste of the Windows Phone user interface, so you can decide if you want to dive in and pay for the full experience. It also lets you to test the app in advance to make sure it works on your particular Android handset.

This Lite edition has several limitations, including a maximum of 6 Tiles which can be pinned to the homescreen, no ability to change Tile themes or customize fonts, only one "Live Folder" limited to just 3 Tiles,  no integration between the Launcher and the Contacts app (a separate app from the developer called "WP7 Contacts") and more.

The full version is just 3 Euros ($4.23 US) and is available only from the developer's website. To get it, you'll have to adjust the setting on your phone that allows you to install off-Market applications if you want to purchase the paid version.

Early reviews of the app on the Market aren't as favorable as those on the XDA forums site, it should be noted. That's probably because this app is still in development, and may be buggy. As always, when it comes to Android apps, your mileage may vary, depending on your device. This isn't a blanket recommendation for the app and we won't be held accountable if it just crashes and burns on you. (It didn't for us, though.)

A Great Alternative: Launcher7

However, there's an alternative to this new app, if you do run into trouble: Launcher7, which some claim is better. The app is available in both free and donate versions. The free version is ad-supported, but it lets you modify your Start screen by dragging the tiles around.

It is also a work in progress, with several more features still planned, including Facebook integration and more animated tiles, among other things.

A Windows Phone-Style Music Player

While you're at it, there's yet another app that can help you complete your Android to Windows Phone transformation: a Windows Phone 7 style music app, available in alpha, from Federico Carnales, the creator of the popular Android app, Launcher Pro. He tweeted the download link just the other day for those brave enough to try it.

Engadget tested it for you, and recorded video of that here.

There are many, many other Windows Phone transformation apps for Android, too, it should be noted, including WP7 ZPlayer, Metro UI Pro and Lite, Windows Phone Android Lite, aPhone7 3D, Windows Phone 7 GO Launcher EX, WP7Contact, and several more inspired by Zune, just to name a few. Do a search on the Android Market to discover them all.

Have you used any of these apps? Share your thoughts and tips in the comments so others can learn from your experiences!

ThemeIt offers jailbreakers a selection of attractive themes which can be used within Winterboard, a popular jailbreak program for complete iPhone customization. For now, there are only paid themes available in ThemeIt, but a section devoted to free themes is arriving soon.

Meanwhile, Jay Freeman's Cydia application, the default jailbreak app store, has been updated to include a revamped theme section, too. For those of you into iPhone customization, today is a very good day.

The ability to install themes is one of the many reason people jailbreak their iPhones. Although Apple lets you update your background wallpaper and lockscreen, some want to do more. They want their phone to feel unique, to not look like everyone else's. Jailbreaking makes that possible. Using Winterboard, jailbreakers can customize nearly everything on the iPhone, from icon sets, to the iPhone's dock and even the text that displays what mobile carrier you use.

However, finding the little tweaks and add-ons for these sorts of iPhone makeovers was something of a treasure hunt using Cydia. You could pick up a widget here and and a new icon set there, but the availability of complete theme packages, where all sorts of tweaks were combined into one single download, was limited.

Some in the jailbreak design community felt there was a need to expand outside of what Cydia provided. And so there came ThemeIt.

ThemeIt Hands-On

ThemeIt's founder, a guy who goes just by "Gab" online (or "FIF7Y," as his design website is called), has been letting me test ThemeIt pre-launch on my iPhone 4. My takeaway? In a nutshell: it's great.

The store is well-built, with intuitive navigation that makes it easy to preview theme screenshots, read descriptions and manage your previous theme purchases.

At launch time, there's a healthy selection of themes available to download, some of which even go a step further than simply updating color schemes and icon sets to offer alternative user interfaces, where icon folders are laid out in curved paths alongside Android-like widgets, for example. There are others where, at first glance, it's hard to even recognize the device as an iPhone.

In short, it's a customizers' dream.

My only complaint is that many of the themes have a masculine vibe to theme, as is typical in jailbreaking circles. There's a great theme with photo widgets that I liked except for the fact that the widget in each screenshot showcased the photo of a scantily-clad woman. No thanks. I'd rather put my own photos in there - why wouldn't that be an option? Sigh.

Not Just an App, an App Store

ThemeIt isn't just an app where you can find great themes - it's an app store, with built-in checkout options for paid themes, support for promo codes, detailed item descriptions, designer bios, notification settings and more.

The process of purchasing a theme is straightforward, too. After logging in, you simply click the "buy now" button, then complete the checkout process using PayPal. You can purchase themes either via the website or within the app on your phone.

I was also able to test the promo code process with the MP2 theme built by FIF7Y himself. It was fast and painless, I'm happy to report.

Both the website and app appear to be running a little slower today than I remember, probably due to the app store's launch and the fair amount of press attention it has received. I imagine it will speed back up after the initial hype has died down.

Cydia Updates Theme Section, Too

In the meantime, Cydia has also seen a theme-related update of its own, no doubt due to the tense situation between FIF7Y and Freeman, aka "Saurik" in jailbreaking circles. (More on that here). In not so coincidental timing, Saruik updated the theme section in Cydia, noting that the revised selection will now feature bi-weekly content updates with additions provided by popular iPhone customization outlets ModMyi, Planet-iPhones and MacCiti.

Even if the change was prompted by Cydia's new competition, it's worth a look, as the themes featured in Cydia appear to be different than those found in ThemeIt. However, as a regular iPhone jailbreaker, I found that many of Cydia themes looked familiar - I had seen them before, for months and months on end. I'm looking forward to the next update, though, to see what new options will arrive.

But the end result for iPhone customizers, is a win-win. There are new themes everywhere for you to try. And if these arrivals have you reconsidering jailbreaking, you can find our most recent how-to guide here.

Note: To install ThemeIt, add http://www.themeitapp.com/repo to Cydia's sources then search for the app in Cydia.

What's an "ID Pack?"

There are three different types of packs available: branded, non-branded and personalized.

Branded ID packs feature a company's own applications and services, like Yahoo's new pack which offers easy access to Yahoo content like the homepage, Mail, Messenger, News, Sports, Finance, Flickr, Fantasy Football, Search, Movies, Weather and omg!.

Non-branded packs are more like curated selections of content. Sprint offers a few of these with focuses on Entertainment, Social Networking, Health and Fitness and Business Productivity.

For example, the "Entertainment" Sprint ID pack contains apps for music (Shazam, Pandora, Rhapsody), movies (IMDB) and TV (TMZ) as well as entertainment-related news (E! News, Express News, Horoscopes), Games (Guitar Hero 5, Super KO Boxing 2, WSOP Hold'em), social networking (Facebook, Twitter, Wertago) and YouTube.

Finally, users can create their own packs by customizing an available packs with their own apps and content. Only five different ID packs can be stored on a device.

A Clever Solution to App Overload, Blurred Boundaries Between Work and Play

Although Hesse touted the ID packs as an improved way for users to customize their phones, find apps and change the phone's settings, assuming this is just another nifty homescreen customization tool is selling it short.

People's phones are now extensions of their lives - they're used for business, for keeping in touch with friends, for playing games, listening to music, streaming video and so much more. But organizing our varying personas and needs is becoming increasingly difficult. We're now close to the "overload" point with our phones becoming inundated with apps. (For app addicts like yours truly, it's getting ugly, I tell you).

Different vendors are attempting to solve the problem in different ways - Apple introduced folders for apps, Windows Phone 7 is using attention-grabbing "hubs,"
and Android users have customizable homescreens that can contain both widgets and apps.

Sprint's ID solution may or may not be the answer - we'll need to test its functionality and performance, first - but at least it's a new take. You can learn more about Sprint ID from the new homepage here.

Until now, Firefox Personas have been a sort of cute, but somewhat unnecessary feature, and one that seems to appeal more to the "junior" set of web surfers. With Personas for things like Lady Gaga, Twilight, Avatar, musicians, popular TV shows and celebs, older web surfers may have felt a little out-of-place when visiting the Gallery's homepage. However, the future of Personas may have have all Firefox users taking a second look.

Future Plans for Personas

On the development roadmap, Mozilla is considering a number of new ideas for these add-on skins, including dynamic Personas, window and/or tab-specific Personas, page specific Personas and self hosted Personas, among other things. There are definitely some intriguing ideas here, although, on the other hand, Personas that changed too often during web surfing could end up being more distracting than useful.

One of the more interesting ideas under consideration is the addition of ambient information into a Persona. Years ago, we looked at an ambient news reader plugin for Firefox which displayed headlines from articles you would be interested in reading. These headlines, determined by an analysis of your web surfing habits, appeared in a beautifully fading list every time you opened a new tab in Firefox. That sort of low-impact information delivery mechanism is a perfect example of what it means to provide "ambient information."

So what sort of ambient information could be embedded into a Persona, we wonder? Could Personas provide statistics on tweets, Diggs and other social actions the way Feedly's toolbar does? Or could they, too, offer up links to related web pages or news stories? What would you want to see?

With Personas, the Focus is on the Browser, not the Web

Another thing to consider is whether or not this planned development means Mozilla is charting a different course for Firefox than rival Google is with their new Chrome browser. Where Chrome makes the browser "go away" with an emphasis on the web and not the tabs, buttons or toolbars, Personas do just the opposite: they return the focus to the browser itself. This would contradict other plans Mozilla was supposedly considering for Firefox's future not too long ago, most notably a design that would put tabs at the top of the browser just like in Chrome. Last summer, Mozilla requested user feedback about this potential revamp, but feedback was mixed.

What do you think about the plans for Personas? Are they interesting enough that you would give them a try? Or do you like a more minimal look for your browser?

While this might be good for some things, we're thinking it could also be like formulating an answer before someone even finishes asking the question.

Horling explains that many of the changes, however, are rather subtle and usually involve rearranging a few results on a page and not providing an entirely different set of results. Google has tailored results on a large scale, such as by country, for years, Horling explains, but is now "applying it at a finer granularity."

While people we are in contact with are often of the same mindset and our location comprises much of our interaction with the world, do we really want Google to assume this for us? If we are researching a topic that is normally completely out of our realm, do we really want the search engine to pull us back in, however subtly? Take Google's "social search" for example.

"The idea behind social search is that we surface content from your social circle," he said. If you know a particular person, for instance, Google may ensure that a document they wrote receives particular prominence on the results page.

Customizing search results, it would seem, can be like putting us in an echo chamber of similar ideas and opinions. If we look up technology related topics in Google, suddenly we are fed links from our tech savvy contacts that Google pulls from our Buzz stream. But what if we are looking for the outside perspective? Even if we aren't intentionally looking for the outside perspective, we're suddenly being subtly driven back to our own world view, as repeated by our peers.

While some examples, like searching for a bus schedule or searching for the words "coffee shop" seem self evident, we have to wonder how these one in five results are changing the way we search the Web.

And if nothing else, we'd rather be able to opt-out if we need, without having to sign out, delete our cookies, clear our cache and reboot the system.

It is not clear if Google will consider these changes when it calculates its overall search results, though we assume that Google will surely collect this data and use it in some form or another.

Google hinted at this SearchWiki experiment in a blog post from August and rumors about a digg-style Google Search interface have floated around the Internet for much longer. Google has always released certain experiments to a small sub-set of its users.

However, as Alex Chitu points out, everybody can see a trace of SearchWiki by appending "&swm=2" to the URL of a search results page. This leads us to believe that Google might be planning for a wider rollout of this feature in the near future.

If you would like to see this new functionality in action, Justin Hileman recorded a short screencast that demonstrates these experimental features.

Then Umair Haque, a well respected blogger and strategist - albeit one who is known for being a bit “out there” - asked Is Etsy the next Google? Maybe Umair was just saying that this is big. One of his commenters pointed out: “not Google, but maybe the next eBay”.

The bloom has gone off the eBay rose recently, so it is interesting to think about what went wrong at what was almost the perfect start-up success. Many people critiqued eBay for buying Skype at too high a valuation, but that seems like a tactical error only. The big issue is that they lost sight of what made eBay special when they started selling mass-produced stuff. There is something about being a public company, with investor pressure for endless hyper growth well beyond the natural growth constraints of the market, that seems to drive this kind of brand-destroying diversification.

Selling off inventory from big companies (eBay’s diversification) may be a great business, but it was not what made eBay magical. Garage sales, antique shops, auctions….these all have a bit of magic and romance. It is about finding something unique and special.

Handmade goods have the same appeal.

Etsy Connections

The reason it is so hard for most technologists to see the power of services such as eBay and Etsy when they first come out is that we tend to look at the world through the prism of big companies and consumers. What is so powerful about eBay is that around 750,000 people see eBay as their primary source of income and double that‚ 1.5 million‚ see it as a significant contribution. Etsy can have the same income-generation impact for lots of people globally. Where do all these millions of people fit in the big company/consumer model?

According to a 2005 survey, close to sixty percent of Americans reported that they dreamed of starting their own business.

Etsy is part of a much broader economic shift. So is the Blog Networks challenge to MSM and the smaller rounds of financing for start-ups in the programmable web.

We may be witnessing the historical high water mark of giant companies in developed economies. In 1955, Fortune 500 companies generated 1/3 of GDP in America. In 2000 that had risen to 2/3. If you prefer %, from 33% to 66%. Hidden in those numbers are the countless family farms that could not withstand the onslaught of Agribusiness and the Mom & Pop shops that closed when Wall Mart came to town.

Imagine a world where the Fortune 500 share of GDP went back to 1/3 and small businesses got back the 1/3 they lost in the last 50 years.

This may be about to happen for 3 big reasons:

1. The Internet reduces transaction friction, making it easier for small businesses to do business with each other, with consumers and with big companies.
2. Big companies are no longer seen as a reliable source of employment; decades of outsourcing and layoffs at the first whiff of a problem, all cloaked in inhuman corporate speak, have had their effect. This changes the risk/reward decision for talent. The best and brightest will more likely go the self-employed route, start a business or work for a small business where at least you have coffee with the owner and he or she looks you in the eye when (s)he has to fire you. Fortune follows talent.
3. Consumers are looking for that extra special something, the customized motorbike and the grass fed local beef and the hand-made jewelry. We want what your average person does not have, the opposite of mass produced products. This growing consumer demand arise from decades of mass affluence and the fact that the Internet makes these types of products visible.

The Rise of Mass Customization

Maybe we are finally going to see the long-anticipated wave of mass customization.

The trouble is, customization costs a lot of money. Ask a Savile Row tailor. Consumers want that special something at a price that is a bit closer to the mass produced stuff.

Who is going to meet that demand for mass customization? The mega farming corp in Iowa that is used to distributing huge volumes via Cargil, onto to General Mills and finally to Wall Mart? Or thousands of artisanal specialty food producers? The supplier who contracts with factories in China to produce huge quantities of toys based on what consumers bought last year and who will lose his price break if he changes the volume? Or the thousands of small producers locally who will custom-produce on demand, meeting the actual demand today?

I would always bet on the latter. This is a distributed version of the Dell model applied to lots of industries. This is distributed mass customization.

The reason that mass customization has taken longer than predicted is that we have been looking in the wrong place. Re-tooling large companies to do mass customization is too hard, the micro-niches are too small and there is just too much fear of cannibalization and resistance to change.

This is the coming wave of small business that can easily trade globally - with each other to offer new products and with consumers to meet specialized demand.

What has been missing is order aggregation. There are plenty of long-tail customers who reject the mass-produced plastic toy made in China but who want the pink version of the Rambo soldier made out of recyclable wood (OK, I made that one up!). But you won’t find enough of these customers by setting up shop on your average high street.

Aggregating the long tail is clearly something that the Internet does well.

Conclusion

Etsy is a good example of an emergent business network that creates trust within a specific market. That trust enlarges the market by enabling transactions to happen. Then more suppliers come into the network to meet growing demand and the range and quality of products improve; and so the consumer demand improves and so on….

Just don’t try shoving mass-produced junk through these networks. It won’t work. These networks have a very good junk filter!