Hello Friends, the lockscreen customization app for Windows Phone 8 that decorates your lock screen with a nice collage of your friends, has received a nice update to v4.0, bringing new colour effects, customisable margin sizes, plus the usual fixes and improvements.

From the Symbian Tweet news post:

“If you love customizing your smartphone, you will definitely love Hello Friends! Hello Friends allows you to decorate your lock screen with a nice collage of your friends! It will be updated on a regular basis, so that there’ll be an exciting new lockscreen whenever you use your smartphone! You don’t have to do anything, it changes automatically from time to time!

The app now also supports addons (weather, battery information) that can be combined with your collage!“

This update contains the following improvements:

• New Feature: 3 Color effects
• Customizable Margin sizes
• Bug fix for custom contact selection
• Several minor improvements

Download Hello Friends

Hello Friends is an insanely great idea. Personally, my problem is that my contact store (both on Google and Microsoft's live.com) is only populated to around 10% with thumbnails - and some of these are of dubious quality. In an ideal world, I'd start again, building up contacts with pro-quality (as per the example screenshots above) photos... I guess I'm waiting on a rainy day to get started!

Comments welcome on how well Hello Friends works for you?