The big Home Menu theme update is now available. Let's see... You get four or five themes pre-installed. They're all pretty basic mono-color deals, but they're all right. Of course there's the Theme Store, where you can buy and redeem codes for themes. Takes a
good while to load up, at least when you want to see all themes. Basic pattern themes go for $1, where anything with custom music seems to go for $2.
Here's a video showing the buying process and a few of the themes in action (I'd recommend playing the video at 2x speed, haha).
Aside from themes, the Home Menu got a lot of other tweaks. It definitely seems smoother; holding right on the d-pad to access stuff that's six squares away used to be a jittery affair, but that jitter is gone, and it even seems like there's a bit of acceleration in there, too. It seems like suspending games is less laggy, too. EDIT: Like, a lot less laggy. Suspending Pokemon X used to be "*press Home button* one, two, three... *suspend sound*". Now it's "*press Home button* *suspend sound*".
This is appreciated: You can now access the top row of icons (brightness, friends, game notes, browser, etc.) with the circle/d-pad! Those all used to be touch-only.
Notifications now functions closer to how phones do it; before you tap the button to read an unread notification, you'll see a banner with the title. Tapping that takes you directly to the notification.
And yeah, screenshots are now in... sorta. You can ONLY take screenshots of the Home Menu itself--you can't capture any games, even while they're suspended. Little bit odd, but you can directly share screenshots to Facebook/Twitter using the Nintendo 3DS Image Share thing that's used in Tomodachi Life and stuff, so I guess you could screenshot the title of a game and say "Look what I bought!"
And lastly, one non-Home Menu thing: The layout of game descriptions in the eShop has been totally revamped. On a title like Theathyrhtym Final Fantasy, you have the demo at the top of the touch screen with the wishlist button in the top-right, followed by trailers. You get to the description by scrolling down, and then you have images, publisher/player/genre info, "People who downloaded this also downloaded...", ratings, Related Genres, and Related Keywords, and then DLC at the bottom (I almost thought they got rid of that!). Certainly an improvement over the five icons in a carousel! You seem to be able to exit out to the home menu at any time--you sometimes had to wait 15 seconds before you could get back before.
EDIT: Found something very minor: When exiting a game, the sound played is the "Cancel" sound, rather than the "Confirm" sound, if that makes sense.