Mobile ringtones are sounds that your mobile phone or cellular phone makes when you begin to receive an incoming call to the handset. With the sheer popularity of ringtones, combined with the increasing technology of mobile phones, the market for ringtones is massive. With a basic landline telephone only producing a basic ringing sound, the mobile phone ringtone was taboo when first released. Ringtones can be downloaded directly to a handset and used to personalize a callers ringing tone. The sole fact that consumers can select which ringtone there mobile phone rings too, is the largest selling point and the main purpose consumers download ringtones.
There is various different types of ringtone, and each format of ringtone is best suited to a range of different mobile phone manufacturers and models of mobile phone. Many consumers who purchase mobile phones believe that they can download any type of ringtone; this is not the case in many situations.
At the current moment in time, there is five different types of ringtone available;
RTTTL is the acronym for Ring Tones Text Transfer Language. RTTTL is a simple binary/text based format that you can use to make/create ringtones that you can upload or transfer onto your mobile phone via various mobile phone uploading techniques e.g. SMS, Bluetooth, Infrared and Data Cable.
Monophonic ringtones are in fact RTTTL ringtones, except RTTTL ringtones are more commonly known merely to ringtone developers. Most commonly found on older mobile phones such as the Nokia 3310, monophonic ringtones can only make one sound at a time; hence monophonic. Each tone or sound is created at a different frequency, which creates a melodic, but very simple sound.
Polyphonic ringtones are only compatible on mobile phones that can produce the playing of 16 separate tones simultaneously. Polyphonic ringtones or poly tones are that little bit more musical than monophonic ringtones, but there is still no proper comparison to a real life music song, such as a CD or MP3. Nearly all modern mobile phones now support polyphonic ringtones.
MP3 ringtones or alternatively know real tones, are ringtones that are complete emulations of CD quality music. As the title suggest, MP3 ringtones are just snippets of MP3 files that are assigned as a ringtone. This allows consumers to play perfect quality sounds from there mobile phone, which fro the first time, has allowed mobile phones to produce real life sounds such as speech and signing. Many consumers now download full track albums to there mobile phone and simply use the MP3 file for recreation, such as using the mobile phone as a MP3 player. This new form of ringtone now allows consumers to kill two birds with one stone and have ringtones and MP3 files.
With today's mobile technology rapidly increasing and the market for mobile phone content expanding dramatically, we have seen the creation of video ringtones. Video ringtones are simply small video clips that you can play on your mobile phone. You then attache a MP3 file to play in the background of the video and when you receive an incoming call, the video clip plays with the ringtone in the background. Although video and mobile ringtones have been around for a long time now, video ringtones have never really reached there full potential in the mobile phone content market.
