Digital Mp3 Player

Ringtones, the sounds cell phones make when a person calls the owner have become the most popular of all mobile accessories. All though, modern technology has advanced considerably from the first types of customized ringtones that were available way back when.

The First Ringtones

The first commercial cellphone with ringtones sold in May of 1996 and it was the Digital Mova N103 Hyper. The ringtones were not downloadable and the phone had just a few preset songs in MIDI format, a high quality audio file format. Then in September of 1996, there was the Digital Minimo D319, the fist cell phone where a user could input an original melody for a ringtone, rather than just a few preset songs.

The first downloadable mobile ringtone service was created and delivered in Finland in 1998. A Finnish mobile company started a service called Harmonium that delivered monophonic ringtones, a series of notes, one musical note at a time.

Harmonium was innovative because it had tools for both individuals to create monophonics, and a mechanism to deliver them over-the-air via SMS to a mobile handset. On November 1998, Digitalphone Groupe started a similar service in Japan. Later came polyphonic downloadable ringtones that were more advanced than the monophonics because they were able to play about 40 notes at a time and sounded more like the actual song they were playing. Neither of these though was able to truly mimick the songs, and could not play lyrics.

Real Music Downloadable Ringtones

Real music tones, also known as, voice tones, music tones or MP3 tones were first introduced in December 2002, and have revolutionized the ringtone industry. In contrast to the others, real music tones are actual MP3's that are downloaded and so they deliver the true music experience with tones and lyrics.

My Gift to You by Chemistry was the first song to be distributed as a truetone. Real music ringtones spread like wildfire, through Europe, Asia and of course the US. It is fascinating how many people have personalized their cell phones with their favorite music tones.

With the huge advancement in technology today, anyone can download their favorite music as a ringtone by simply entering their cell phone number into an online order form and get the music instantly downloaded. And, today, real music ringtones allow people to download the hottest and latest tracks within any genre of music, including, pop, hip hop, country, rock, jazz and classical and they are available with almost every different mobile phone carriers and many cell phone models.