| 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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Nicolas
writes here Ringtones
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Nicolas Fogelholm
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