Downloadable Ringtones - The History of a Phenomenon

Ringtones are the sounds cell phones make when a person calls the cell phone subscriber and have truly become a phenomenon and the most popular of all mobile accessories. It is interesting how modern technology has considerably advanced from the first types of downloadable ringtones that were available way back when.

The first commercial cell phone with ringtones, the Digital Mova N103 Hyper, sold in May of 1996. It had a just few preset songs in MIDI format, a high quality audio file format. Then in September of 1996, came the first cell phone, the Digital Minimo D319, where a user had the option and 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. Harmonium was a true innovator 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 the similar service in Japan. Later came polyphonic 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 tones, also known as, voice tones, music tones or MP3 tones were first introduced in December 2002, and have revolutionized the downloadable ringtone industry. In contrast to the others, real music tones are actual MP3's downloaded to a mobile phone as ringtones 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 music ringtone. 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.

Polyphonic downloadable ringtones are still available today, all though they are not as widely used as real music tones. Polyphonics are mainly used for older cell models as it is mostly newer models that are capable of downloading and playing real music tones.

With the huge advancement in technnology today, anyone with a newer phone model can download their favorite music tones by simply entering their cell phone number into an online order form and get the music instantly downloaded.

And, today, real music downloadable ringtones allow people to get 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.