Like many geeks, one of the first things I like to do after purchasing new technology is finding its settings and customizing it to make it my own. Such is the case after I purchased the Motorola Droid-X yesterday.
First off, the Droid-X is amazing — a huge change of pace from my previous phone, the Blackberry Tour. The default wallpaper sets are sharp, but that’s exactly what they are: defaults. The live wallpapers are slick also (Especially the Mario Live Wallpaper), but they consume more battery power.
The viewing resolution of a Droid-X is 480×854 pixels. However, if you want to make a wallpaper for the phone, you will need to create an image that is 960×854.
This is due to the seven different panels that a user can customize. From the home screen, a user simply needs to flick left or right to view the other panels. As they move around, however, the wallpaper shuffles along as well, creating an interesting effect of breadth.
This is how it breaks down. We’ll start with the overall wallpaper image:
Size: 960x854 pixels
As you move left or right, the screen moves over in increments of 80px.
The viewable panel areas are highlighted in red.
Home Panel
Panel 2
Panel 2
Panel 2
Panel 5
Panel 6
Panel 7
Knowing this information, you should be able to make some really creative designs for the Droid-X.
About the author
Joey Hernandez
Joey is a Web Developer/Designer from San Diego, CA. He has experience with Wordpress, PHP, HTML, and CSS. He also co-owns a web site consulting business named Gorirra Consulting. If you're interested in having him create a web site for you, visit the site and contact him.
More articles by Joey Hernandez
Thanks a lot, this helped. I was wondering why it didn’t work when I created 480 x 854 images
Glad to hear, Martin! It was tough to wrap our heads around the weird scrolling wallpaper as well…
Thank you Joey! The Technical experts at Verizon were no help with those specs! I am curious…do you know what file type is best to save your design as?
thank you, kevin! i’m glad to be of help (especially the fact that i knew something verizon didn’t).
as for the file type, i just used a jpg and it looks as clean as clean can be on my phone
Thanks for the info. I’m working on the icon placements as well to know what will be visible. I’d love it if you had that already but if not I can figure it or and let you know if you wasn’t that info.
Thanks, Kevin.
The thought of icon placement didn’t hit me, actually. Interesting — are you going to try to incorporate the placements with the wallpaper?
I think that would be a cool idea, but you have to remember that when you scroll through your different panels, the icons move faster than the wallpaper.
Thanks for the info. I made a solid black .jpg as a test and it works fine. One thing I did not see is where the “wallpaper” folder is on the Droid X. As a work around I copied the .jpg into my “DCIM\Camera” folder then from the settings menu I can select it as wallpaper from my camera roll. Downside to this is that a solid black image is now in my camera roll and would show up if I did a slideshow. Is there a better way to add a custom wallpaper?
What I did was email it to myself (gmail), then downloaded the image. It will now show up in “All Photos,” but not in the “Camera roll”
This helped a ton…also I incorporated my icon placements to accentuate my background and it looks killer!! Thanks for the help guys!
I’m curious to see what that looks like: wanna send me a pic to joey@mattersofgrey.com?
Thank you. This is the best description I’ve seen thus far.