Sunshine. Leisurely strolls through the park. Birdsong.
These are just some of the loveliness we all associate with summer.
However, residents of the Northern Hemisphere, who are enjoying summer right now, might find something disturbingly unnatural about the birdsong these days.
American cellular service provider AT&T is coughing up money to some of their subscribers as part of a recent class action lawsuit settlement.
The United States, like the rest of the Northern Hemisphere, is gripped by spring fever right now. And even though the American Presidential election won’t take place until late autumn, the political campaigns have already reached fever pitch.
In this digital era, voters have more options than merely slapping a bumper sticker with their favourite candidate’s name on it on their cars. These days, they can quite literally make their allegiance heard on their cellphones.
One person’s favourite cellular ringtone is another person’s major annoyance. Yes, in very much the same way a writer stating the obvious during an opening sentence is many a reader’s major annoyance. Tell you something you do NOT know, right?
In 2006, a newspaper survey conducted in the United States found that cellular ringtones were the main pet peeves for office workers, which is what led many American companies to institute cell phone bans at the office during working hours.
If those office workers were annoyed by their colleagues’ ideas of cool ringtones, then this will drive them over the edge: On April 10, Arphiola, a leading B2B (Business to Business) Mobile Content Provider, announced the official launch of their ‘Out-Of-Tune’ ringtones. And yes, ‘Out-Of-Tune’ means exactly that: these ringtones are “ugly and annoying re-productions of popular songs and TV and movie themes†(Arphiola’s own words).
This brand new year is already well under way with January almost drawing to a close, and whatever ringtone you and your phone rang in the New Year with, we wish all of you a happy, healthy and prosperous 2008!
So, what is the buzz on ringtones and ringtone trends this year? (Brace yourself for some statistics.)
Ringtones are quite a powerful tool for pre-releasing new material to the public. I’m talking about bands of course. I’m seeing it all the time and it adds a revenue stream for the band as well. I actually think that normal ringtones will make place for full songs and all cellphones will pretty much be able to work like your standard iPod (enters the iPhone).
iPhone is somewhat of a logical upgrade on the iPod. It’s teen heaven. They can listen to music, and chat to friends. As far as ringtones are concerned, the age old problem of digital rights management still looms and the fact that MP3 is still a problem. The problem with this problem though is the high demand for MP3′s.
Will there ever be a proper solution to this? I think Apple’s getting it pretty much right at the moment. I’m looking forward to seeing what their competitors do to counter this technology. I’ve seen many DJ-Scratching phones, walkman type phones with larger memory etc, but battery power seems to be a problem.
Lets get some popcorn and see what happens!
Found a free new service for converting realtones (voice ringtones). Check out Cellsea online. You upload, convert, decide on the part of the file you want to use as ringtone and then download via WAP. Looks like a nice service.
For the past 2 weeks my LG Chocolate phone has started giving me trouble in that the screen goes white when I open it up. Everything else works, it just seems to lose the connection to the screen or something. Obviously this is extremely frustrating and I’m looking for a software upgrade since my service provider said something about a software problem. Could it be because of a software bug, or is it a mechanical failure? If anyone knows anything about it, please comment over here!! Would love to solve this mystery!
I’m constantly asked where people can find tones for their Nextel phones, so I’ve been checking around a bit to see what’s out there. With RingtoneBuddy you can easily upload ringtones to your Nextel phone and there seems to be just a once of registration fee whereafter everything is free! If anyone has signed up for it, you can post your reviews by replying to this post. To sign up for RingtoneBuddy Click Here!
I’m busy researching caller ringtones, it seems quite interesting and I’ll be making some posts about that in the near future. If you’re looking for Celcom caller ringtones, this might just be the place as I’ll be basing my research on celcom caller ringers.