What exactly are ring tones and where did they come from?

A ringer or ring tone is just a sound that a phone makes to tell people that they have a phone call. Of course ringtones have been around as long as telephones have been around, it’s just that a long time ago every phone had the same ringtone. They came with the phone. Of course we’re talking about fixed land phones here.

But even in the early days of mobile or cell phones you just got a ring tone with the phone. No options. It sounded like a normal fixed phone ringer too.

But as time progressed things changed. In 1998 in Finland the first commercial ring tones came out. A new service came out called Harmonium. Harmonium allowed users to create monophonic ringers so people could create and download their own ring tone.

That was just the start and it didn’t take too long before large companies saw commercial mileage to be made from ring tones for cell phones and the revolution in ringers began.

By 2005 the ringtone industry generated over $2 billion in revenue, a staggering amount of money for something as simple as a sound made by a mobile phone when someone calls it. Read the rest of this entry

You’ll see lots of information about polyphonic and monophonice ringtones, but what are they?

Polyphonic ringers. A fancy name, but what does it mean? Monophonic ringers. Same deal.

A polyphonic ring tone (a poly tone) can create multiple tones or musical notes at the same time. It’s a reproduction or creation of the sound, rather than a recording of it, however it produces an excellent reproduction and hence a great ringer for your mobile phone.

And of course it depends on the quality of your cell phone. Different phones have different capacities to reproduce or simulate notes simultaneously. Some up to 72 at the same time.

So what are monophonic ringers? Well as polyphonic ringers can reproduce a number of notes at the same time, monophonic ones only reproduce one.

Is there more? How about real music ring tones. What are they? Real music ringers can reproduce the actual music itself. Poly tones simulate the music by a combination of sounds, but real music ringers actually reproduce the music itself. And that way it can reproduce vocals for instance.

And there’s even more. Truetones. What are they? True tones (sometimes calle realtone, mastertone, or superphonic ringtone) are ring tones that are made from high quality formats like mmp3. These are high quality ring tones and are becoming more and more popular as our insatiable appetite for hot new and high quality ringers increases. Read the rest of this entry

There’s lots of sites offering free cell phone ringers.

But are they really free?

Now we’re not saying that all those free cell phone ring tone downloads are a scam. Not at all. If you search free cell phone ring tone download on google you’ll find quite a few sites that offer downloads of free ring tones. And a lot of them really do offer free downloads.

But quite a few don’t.

There’s quite a few tricks that they get away with that allow them to offer a “free” download of a ringtone when it isn’t free at all.

For example. What about a site that will give you a free download, but only after you’ve purchased something else from them, perhaps some other gadget for your mobile phone. Is that a free ringtone or not? Well it’s not a free ring tone in our book. You’ve paid for it by buying something to get it.

Now maybe you would have purchased that item anyway, but either way the visit to their site has cost you. And if you had gone to a genuinely free ring tone site you’d have got the ringtone for nothing.

Not a free ringer in our view.

Beware of what getting into. For example if you’ve decided to download a ringtone and it’s supposed to be free, and you’re being asked for your credit card number, then be wary. Maybe the ringer really is free, but if so why do they want your credit card number? Read the rest of this entry