How to Install Flash Lite Menus

DISCLAIMER: This guide is for Sony Ericsson phones ONLY. This guide assumes you have a strong understanding of flashing your phone with FAR+SEFP, PhoneXS, etc. I am NOT liable for any damage this tutorial may have caused to your computer or cellphone. Please visit SE-NSE if you have any questions about FAR+SEFP, PhoneXS or flashing your phone.

There have been quite a few finished flash lite menus circulating the internet which are quite impressive. Here's a quick run down on how to implement them into your Sony Ericsson flash lite enabled phone, since you need to associate them with a theme file.

*NOTE: In order to implement flash lite menus, your phone MUST support flash lite applications and it MUST be enabled. To find out if your phone supports Flash Lite, please go here.

*IMPORTANT: If you already have a flash menu file that comes with it's own thm file, you can skip to step 13.

1) Download TUGZip (link). You will need to create the thm file which is required.

2) Locate the swf (flash menu file) you will be using. Let's call ours custom.swf.

3) Either locate an existing theme file you want to use or create your own theme file (using Sony Ericsson Theme creator) - for simplicity, we will call ours theme.thm

4) Rename theme.thm to theme.tar

5) Open theme.tar (using winRAR) and extract the files to a specific directory.

6) Inside the extracted directory, you will find Theme.xml, open it up with your preferred text editor


7) The first couple lines should look like this:

<!-- Created with Sony Ericsson Themes Creator -->
<sony_ericsson_theme version="4.1">
<span style="font-weight: bold;">
<desktop_style type="File" source="custom.swf"></desktop_style></span>
<author_firstname value="phirewerkz"></author_firstname></sony_ericsson_theme>

8) If the theme.thm file you used was already linked to a flash theme file, then the bolded line should be present. However, if you've created your own theme, this line will not be present. So you will need to either:
a) Add this line in, replacing custom.swf with the name of the flash menu file you have OR
b) Edit this line, replacing custom.swf with the name of the flash menu file.

9) Save the file.

10) Open TUGZip and create a TAR archive of the files you had extracted (from Step 5) . (IE - the NOW edited theme.xml along with any thing else that was extracted). For this example, we will call it custom.tar. DO NOT include the swf file in this archive.

*NOTE: Using 7zip did not seem to work, as the cellphone would have an error when you try to set the theme.

11) Rename custom.tar to custom.thm

12) By this point, you now have custom.thm (which correctly points to your swf file) and custom.swf.

13) Now, breakin into your phone (Flash the main with header using PhoneXS, breakin with SEFP+FAR, or whatever you use). For precuation, make sure you fully charge your phone battery and remove SIM card/Memory stick before proceeding to ensure they don't get affected somehow.

*NOTE: For more information regarding this concept, please visit the tutorial on SE-NSE forums.

14) Browse to tpa\preset\system\desktop\flash and upload the custom.swf into there. DO NOT upload custom.thm here.

15) Exit the program. (Reflash your main with PhoneXS or whatever you use)

16) Reconnect your phone to your USB as you would for file transfer

17) Upload the custom.thm file onto your phone

18) Unplug USB, turn on cellphone, and browse to themes

19) You should now be able to select and implement the theme.

There you have it. Hope this made sense.