It started with the Nokia Tune, which is a 13 note rendering of
Francisco Tarrega's, Gran Vals, who was a 19th-century Spanish
musician.
The first ringtones were monophonic, which mean that only one
note is played at a time.
Some of the early cell phone models, had a built in ringtone
composer. To compose free ringtones directly to the phone or to
make them with a ringtone composer, never became a big hit. The
year 2002 is a major milestone in ringtone history. Nokia 3510
was the first phone optimized for playing polyphonic ringtones.
Soon other cell phone companies also adopted the MIDI standard
that enables more realistic polyphonic sounds for ringtones.
The year 2003 was the actual breakthrough for polyphonic
ringtones. Cell phone makers, operators and content providers
also came up with new concepts and ringtone formats. Motorola
introduced Groovetunes and Nokia introduced Nokia True Tones.
Ringtone web sites also started to offer voice ringtones with
voices of celebrities as ringtones.
Today, with phones like The Sony Ericsson W800, Nokia N91 and
MOtorolas iTunes phone, we could be facing a new milestone in
the ringtone history. Polyphonic ringtones still rock, but as
you can see from the short history presented above, things
change. Today the internet is full of MP3 music, both legal and
illegal, and you can use Bluetooth to transfer music files from
a PC to your cell phone.
More about ringtones
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