Short History of Cellphone Ringtones

RobotWisdom writes "This week's New Yorker magazine includes an interesting short history of cellphone ringtones, including statistics on their (huge) profitability worldwide. My favorite quote: 'I spent three days of productive work time listening to polyphonic ringtone versions of speed metal, trying to find exactly the ringtone that expressed my personality with enough irony and enough coolness that I could live with it going off ten times a day. In a quiet room, in a meeting, this phone's gonna go off-- what are they going to hear?'"

Comments

beep

[3.09 a hour]

This is why i use the single beep ringer, its short and functional, and acceptable in all areas. As an added benifit, if you left it on somewhere you shouldn't like school or the movies, one beep could be anything and mos tpeople arn't even sure they heard it.

Re:Ringtones are one of the dumbest things to pay

[Hes Nikke]

here's your fix... Give an MP3/MIDI... :P

Re:wow

[tomhudson]

unsuccessfully finding a "free" ringtone website

All you have to do is look at the page source for any of the sites that demo the ring tones (they're usually along the lines of ringtones/poly0010, ringtones/poly0011, ringtones/poly0012 ...). curl and wget are your friends.

I grabbed a couple hundred from a pay site that way, got them to play in xmms, along with selected Weird Al tunes, then plugged the sound card output into the company phone system's "hold" music for a couple of days (took them that long to realize people on hold were getting Neutron Dance or Amish Paradise instead of muzak)...

Re:What are they going to hear?

[EspoManiac]

Here you are:
http://www.geek.nl/pics/dilbert-arch/dilbert-20030 704.gif

Re:wow

[MikeFM]

If your phone has web access then it should be no big deal to install a ringtone of your own. Most phones, even the cheapy ones, have supported web access for years now. It's not to hard to install them if you have your own web server or use one of the free services available to 'send' the ringtone to your phone.

I'm working on an opensourced program that will ease producing wallpapers and ringtones and send them directly to your phone or webserver for you. If interested ask on the mobile-oss mailing list. Let me know what model of phone you have and what carrier you use.