Grab a new wallpaper for your N97 or 5800 XpressMusic.

A couple of weeks ago, I found a really, really, awesome desktop wallpaper. And so I decided it needed to be on my phone. After a little resizing, color changes, and experimentation on how the N97 deals with custom wallpapers (verdict: it doesn’t) – I came up with this.

Grab it inside. Also, more about the bugginess that is the N97’s custom wallpaper display feature.

The N97 has a 300×640 screen. Originally I resized the wallpaper below to the standard 300×640, expecting everything to just work flawlessly. Ha! While the image displayed correctly in Portrait mode (ie vertically), the N97’s landscape view completely obliterated the wallpaper, turning it into some blown-up piece of crap. Here’s why.

In landscape mode, instead of doing the normal thing and rotating your 300×640 image 90 degrees, the N97 actually takes a 640×300 slice of your picture, starting from the center. This is a little hard to explain, so check out the following picture:

The N97 will ignore the four corners of the above square wallpaper, and will just use either the vertical or horizontal center. That means, when creating a custom wallpaper, you should probably just use a square image to make life easier. Just remember that the N97 will only take into account the plus-shaped section of it for portrait/landscape display purposes.

Finally, don’t use a 300×640 picture. Otherwise, for landscape mode the N97 will just take the horizontal center, which would be a 300×300 square expanded to fit a 300×640 picture. Trust me, it’s ugly.

Wallpapers

The original version was a red one, I changed it up to a cooler shade of blue. You can also use either in your 5800 XpressMusic, but you may want to resize it to 300×640. Since the 5800XM doesn’t rotate the home screen, the above doesn’t apply to it.

How to Install

1. First download the images above. Left-click on the thumbnail, then right-click on the image and select “Save Picture As…”
2. Transfer the wallpapers to your phone
3. At your N97’s Home screen, touch any widgeted area and hold for about 2 seconds. You should see a small menu pop up, with the last option being “Change Wallpaper”.
4. Navigate to where you transferred your wallpaper and select it.

I don’t actually know who to credit for the original image. I found it via one of the 4chan wallpaper search engines, if that helps.