One of my “hobbies” is customizing my computers and electronics to my own style. It can be as simple as a wallpaper change all the way to a complete change of the user interface. My iPhone is another piece of electronics that gets my attention when it comes to personalization, but unfortunately there aren’t too many ways to alter the look asides from re-arranging some icons and changing the wallpaper. I also have a couple of other cell phones around the house belonging to various family members, and they always want wallpapers made for their phone too, so I went looking for a solution.

Obviously, I can fire up Photoshop, Pixelmator, iPhoto, or any of the other various image editing applications out there and go through the process of cropping, resizing, and the other steps involved to get an image suited for my phone. I have done that procedure many a times, and something always seems to get messed up, so I decided to try an application dedicated to creating wallpapers for the iPhone, and many other popular mobile phones as well. I grabbed a copy of Phone Wallpaper X from Polo Planet Software to give it a shot.

Phone Wallpaper X comes with a load of sample images to use, or you can opt to use your own images by dragging and dropping them into the image gallery, or importing your photo directory. The gallery allows you to organize all the images into folders for easy navigation. Open the image in the editor, and you now have a wide variety of editing options at your fingertips. All the options you need to tailor the image to your phone is here. Cropping, resizing, rotating, and lets not leave out the Core filters to alter the image even more.

Once your wallpaper image is ready, you can get it to your phone inone of several ways. Phone Wallpaper X supports uploading to a wide variety of phones via Bluetooth or USB. If you have a phone that isn’t supported, or you don’t want to upload via those methods, then don’t worry, it’s just as easy to upload the image to your preferred directory, or e-mail the wallpaper. If you are like me and have several different models of phones in the household, Phone Wallpaper X lets you have different settings for each of your phones. This is great because you won’t have to worry about the size of the final wallpaper image or upload settings after the initial setup.

As I said before, you can manually create your phone/PDA wallpapers with your favorite image editor, but using Phone Wallpaper X made the process so much easier, I can’t see myself doing it any other way from now on. At $19.95 the retail edition is a bargain, but if you don’t need all the features the Lite version ($8.95) might be the way to go.