Well I recently picked up a Blackberry Pearl, and HATED the colors Verizon had available.
For awhile, I have known about skinit.com and had wanted to try them out on old cell phones of mine, including the iPod I have. I never had a REAL excuse to get one until now (since I wanted to cover up the silver color of the Pearl I bought).
Skinit.com is a place that sells custom "skins" (removeable "stickers", if you will) for pretty much ANY device; cell phones, cameras, mp3 players, laptops, gaming devices, etc., etc.
Now, they have HUNDREDS of stock designs, pictures, and logos for skins, but they also have a "Create Your Own!" customizer. You can take ANY image you own on your PC or from the net, and turn it into a skin for any device.
I used the customizer to use a composite I made of tokidoki prints for the front (I made the image in Photoshop, pasting together a bunch of different tokidoki images and designs together in one image), and a popular tokidoki poster for the back, and make a skin for my BBPearl. This is how it came out:
(
Note: I specifically made the skin so that the background/wallpaper in my Blackberry menu would match and flow with the rest of the skin, as if it was ONE image.)
Now for my review!
The customizer was very, VERY easy to use, and oh-so convenient! All you do is Browse from your computer, and it drops the image into the customizer, where you can drag the image on to your phone to see where you'd like to place it. You can even resize and rotate the image so it can best fit your device/cell phone.
The best thing was, at one point, I accidentally closed out of Firefox, and assumed I would have lost all the work I had done, but when I went back to skinit.com and clicked on the customizer, it had auto-saved my skin!
After I was finished building my skin, I placed an order. I was able to find a 25% off promotion online (spring08), and it came out to $14.97 (+ 2.99 for normal shipping). I thought this was a great price, since the skins and cases I see in every mall for cell phones go for $20 and up. I placed the order on Saturday before 5pm, and received it today (Friday). For something that was customized, I think it shipped rather quickly!
When it arrived, there were only two things I was a bit bummed about
:
1.) It wasn't made out of the material I thought it would be. If you've ever seen those sticker-esque skins in the mall in the kiosks for cell phones and iPods, it's sort of made out of a.... how do I explain this. Remember when you were a kid, and you collected stickers, and everyone always wanted the stickers that were raised, almost like a bubble? Thats how the skins in the mall are, and what I expected this to be. The skins from skinit.com are just a flat sticker, basically. They are removable, however, and will prevent scratching, since they are a bit thick, so there's a plus side to it either way.
2.) I didn't THINK I resized the image on the back of my phone to be LARGER than when I imported, but it printed very, very slightly pixelated. I suppose to the average person, they might not even notice, but being a Graphic Designer, and working with printed materials all day, it really bugged me.
Anyways, I'm pretty happy with it, especially for $15!
Some of you will probably hate the design I choose, but I'm a big tokidoki fan.
Tokidoki is the Japanese-inspired lifestyle brand created in 2005 by Italian artist Simone Legno and his business partners Pooneh Mohajer and Ivan Arnold. Tokidoki produces apparel and other products using art and iconic characters designed by Simone Legno.
tokidoki - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
If you guys want to know more about skinit, their website is
Skinit.com, and I also found a video about them on youtube at
YouTube - The Balancing Act Show 817 - Skinit ®. If you're interested in seeing more tokidoki, you can visit their main site at
tokidoki.
Skinit.com review
Yeah it totally is. I'm not a "busy" type of person at all, either. ALL my gadgets are a glossy black (laptop, ex-cell phone, iPod, PSP, etc.), and I was very upset Verizon didn't sell the black BBPearls. Buuut, I figured I'd try something different, and made myself a skin no one else would have. 
