Today many, if not most, people use their own mobile phones every day everywhere. However, most, if not all, mobile phone users know little about the history of mobile phones, especially the history of accessory resources such as ringtones. Due to the remarkable development of mobile phones, users feel new desires and are exposed to new ideas and inventions, while few of them would like to focus on the process of how they are developed. When asked how much they know about the history of ringtones, users can reply that they know nothing about it. Since we pay too much attention to trends rather than history, it’s about time we learned more about the history of ringtones.
The first commercial mobile phone with ringtones was NEC’s Japanese NTT DoCoMo Digital Mova N103 Hyper, sold in May 1996. It had some songs preset in MIDI format. Four months later, Digital Minimo D319 became the first mobile phone in which a user could enter an original melody, instead of the predefined songs. These phones proved popular in Japan and the point is backed up by the fact that the popular songs company sold more than 3.5 million copies.
Finland became the place where the first downloadable mobile ringtone service was created and delivered in the fall of 1998 when a Finnish mobile operator started its service called Harmonium. The service contained cockpit tools for people to create monophonic ringtones and a mechanism to send them over the air via SMS to a mobile phone.
Monophonic ringtones, polyphonic ringtones, and true tones are three basic types of ringtones. Ringtones became one of the first successful e-commerce services, with social media features like composing, sharing, and rating ringtones.
The history of ringtones is a history of innovation. New ideas are proposed, while inventions are created one after another. The sales and marketing of ringtones is an excellent example of vertical convergence of telecommunications, as it is true that ringtones generated more than $ 2 billion in annual revenue worldwide in 2005. Fortunately, users found us We benefit greatly from the remarkable development of ringtones.
