Your Cell Phone

The availability of ringtones brings a whole new opportunity for creativity into your life. Some phones allow you to compose your own melodies for ringtones. Sometimes this means that you push buttons to create ringtones. Other times the programs are more sophisticated and allow you to create actual music for your ringtones. In some cases, if you know how to compose music with a computer, you can create computer-generated music and transfer it into your cell phone to use for ringtones.

Some musicians have even found a new career in composing ringtones. Downloading ringtones from a ringtones composer is one way to have unique ringtones for your cell phone.

Most people won’t go that far in looking for unique ringtones. Such a wide range of ringtones are available for download that for most of us, selecting ringtones and assigning them to different people is as creative as we want to be. Choosing your own ringtones gives you a chance to express your personality – and it also improves the chance that when you’re in a group of people, you won’t have the same ringtones as anyone else in the room.

Musical ringtones have become so popular that some people are choosing to express their individuality by being “retro.” They choose ringtones that sound like….a phone ringing. Instead of music, you can opt for “techno” sounds that mimic telephones of different countries (for example, the “beepbeep…..beepbeep” of English telephones) or represent a continually rising sequence of sounds. Some phones even allow you to choose a voice announcement instead of a musical phone: the cell phone equivalent of “You’ve Got Mail.”

All sorts of ringtones are available for cell phones these days. The only limit on what ringtones you can use is the type of cell phone you have. Cell phones come with a preprogrammed collection of ringtones from which you can select. Many cell phones will also allow you to download new ringtones whenever you like.

Some phones allow you to set different ringtones for different people. You can choose one of the ringtones for friends, one of the ringtones for family, one of the ringtones for business associates, and one of the ringtones for unknown callers. With some cell phones, you can set different ringtones for every person in your cell phone’s memory. This, in effect, becomes a kind of caller ID for your cell phone; with different ringtones, you don’t even have to look at the cell phone’s display screen to know who is calling.

One drawback to using too many ringtones is that you need to be the kind of person who will recognize each tone and what it means. When you’re home alone, it’s not a problem, but when you’re in public, it can be embarrassing if you don’t recognize that it’s your own cell phone that is ringing!

One trick for using and remembering personalized ringtones to identify different callers is to let them choose their own identifying ringtone. You are more likely to remember that your best friend is calling if you remember her choosing her favorite song.

When selecting the ringtones to identify different people, make sure that you don’t choose one as a private joke that could turn into a public embarrassment. “Fat-Bottomed Girls” may help you recognize a call from a chubby friend, but don’t use it if you’re not sure she’ll get the joke.

By definition, a ring tone is simply the sound that a phone emits when there is an incoming call or a new message. These days, however, the term ring tone denotes the many customizable sounds that are available for use in a cell phone. Ring tones are usually patterned after popular songs or sound bites.

The original use of the ring tone was to allow the cell phone owner to distinguish his or her phone’s ring when in a public area. For example, in a crowded restaurant there might be fifty cell phone users. If all of their ring tones were the same, then one call will result in all fifty reaching for their units. That can be potentially confusing – and terribly annoying. By using original ring tones, however, a cell phone owner will be able to tell apart the ringing of his phone from that of another.

Just a few years ago, you could only assign a single ring tone to your phone at any given time. These days, phones are available that allow you to assign a different ring tone for every person in your address book, which means that you can identify who is calling you without even looking at your unit.

Ring tones are no longer just badges of cellular phone identification; they have also become a cultural phenomenon. Selling ring tones, mostly over the internet, is a brisk business which generates millions of dollars of revenues per year. It seems that everyone wants to have the latest chart-topping songs on their cell phones. And with the introduction of polyphonic tones, the ring tone industry is only going to get bigger.