Microsoft is a company known for its shortcomings. I could spend the entire day and few thousand lines of pixels here going over just some of them, but one particular one I’ll touch on is it’s lack of ringtone management on Windows Mobile. With it’s lackluster ability to associate custom rings to a call, I’ve become very frustrated with both my XV6700 and Motorola Q. Thankfully with the latest release of Window Mobile 5, Microsoft finally added ringtones to each contact; however, there is no easy and quick way to add a custom ring to a slew of friends or groups. With a few ringtone managers available to aid in this failing, none really have made the management in the ringtone manager easy with a small footprint. Is Electric Pocket’s Ringo that manager?
Ringo has been a popular fixture on PalmOS Treos including the new 700p. The 700w has also been equipped with this easy to use ringtone manager that comes with 50 MP3 ringtones for immediate use. You will be able to use any MP3 or WMA file for a specific ring for a certain somebody or somebodies as well as being able to assign the two file formats to SMS delivery alerts for that important person.
“Smartphones are truly lifestyle devices and Ringo enhances the experience by allowing users to personalize it to match their moods,” said Iain Barclay, Electric Pocket’s Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer. “With access to over 50 free MP3 ringtones built right into the application, we believe Ringo will be enormously popular among Smartphone users.”
Your smartphone is probably in the included bunch of supported phones, Cingular 2125, Motorola Q, T-Mobile Dash and the SPV C600 from Orange, so why don’t you give it a looks-see. For $19.99, it may be a winner.
SvenOnTech recieved an interesting e-mail the other day. In it, it claimed there was a new ringtone (custom ringers for your cell phone) that could only be heard by teenagers and children. The ringtone called the “Mozzy Tone” or Mosquito Ringtone plays its “music” at 17-kilohertz. Merck Manual of Daignosis and Therapy states that starting at the age of 20, adults begin to lose their hearing. The first frequency that our ears begin to drop from our hearing capacity is 18 to 20 KHz. Those 65 and older are sure bets not to be able to hear this range.
Banking on this little known fact, Opera Telecom is pushing this toward kids. Gary Corbett, CEO of Opera Telecom, told SvenOnTech, “Kids will love ‘Mozzy Tones’ because only they are meant to hear it. Some adults will literally have to put the phone right up to their ear in order to make out the sound of a mosquito, and if they stand a few feet away they won’t be able to hear anything at all.”
The irony of this ringtone is that it was first used as a deterrent sound. Compound Security invented the mosquito sound as a security measure. Simon Morris, Marketing Director for Compound Security, elaborated saying, “The high-frequency buzzer device that we originally developed was actually designed to irritate youngsters and deter them from hanging around outside shops.” Now Compound Sound has teamed up with Opera Telecom so the kiddies can have it on their cells. Go figure.
Annoyed or not, teens like the ringtone because only they can hear their phone ring and adults never know if a call is coming in or not. If you’re one such teen, then you can purchase your own version for your phone at www.mozzytones.com. Of course, if you don’t want adults knowing that your phone is ringing, you can always just turn on vibrate as it is a free option. But then again, children will be children. 