Here's an interesting utility, discovered by Ali here: Extra Buttons puts two extra buttons in your Belle homescreen toolbar, filling in some of the (nominally) wasted space. You can pick from shortcuts to the task manager, power saving mode, lock function, phone restart and display brightness control. Pretty cool, though note that it's not freeware and that it's currently portrait mode only.

The other shortcuts are pretty useful too- the brightness offers 4 settings (0%, 50%, 100% and Auto) which is a pretty time saving solution rather than having to go into settings and changing it manually; the Battery saver is pretty cool as well because it aslo displays the remaining battery percentage in the shortcut itself.

My only issue with apps like this is that they tend to be inconsistent; which becomes a nuisance more than a help because you can’t rely on them (I recall similar issue with the ‘FastPanel’ that was a Pre-Belle drag down status bar); hopefully Extra Buttons is a more consistent app.

Fast Panel is on the Nokia Store for 1 Euro/Dollar (currently only supports portrait mode- but according to the app info landscape is currently in Quality Assurance)

Ali includes a video which runs you through the little utility:

And you can buy it for yourself, if you wish, here on the Nokia Store (for Belle devices only)...