Cell phones used to ring. Now they sing.
With the right phone and a computer, cell users can get rid of boring brrrr-ings and replace them with such tunes as the Armenian national anthem or "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" or even such standards as "I've Got You Under My Skin."
All of this has the potential to make a trip through an airport or a train commute more interesting - or annoying, depending on one's point of view. For cell phone users, a personalized ring can be a mark of identity.
"If I like Britney Spears, I would like to have music by Britney Spears and display to the rest of the world I'm a Britney Spears fan," said Eric Bernatchez of Montreal, who writes a cell phone guide for About.com.
Although the ring-tone phenomenon is fairly new to the United States and hasn't caught on in a big way, it's hugely popular in Europe and Japan.
In Nokia Corp.'s home county, Finland, where three of four people carry cell phones, ring tones have a practical purpose: determining whose phone is ringing.
"As far as I can tell, ring tones don't bother people here. Really, it's the best way to know whose phone is ringing," said Charlie Schick, a marketing manager at Nokia in Finland and owner of eScribe, an online archive of mailing lists.
Many new cell phones come equipped with a dozen or more programmed rings. But in such places as Finland and Japan, cell phone users want, and perhaps need, something more distinctive.
"If everybody had the same 15 or 20 ring tones that come with the phone, that would be a problem," Bernatchez said. "I was in an elevator recently in America and had a StarTac phone, which didn't have a custom ring tone. Somebody's phone went off, and I wasn't sure if it was me or him."
In Japan, people use cell phones not only to receive calls, but to get e-mail messages, download animation and entertain themselves, said Tracey Northcott, who works in Tokyo with the Enfour Group, a mobile software developer.
"Some enterprising companies have capitalized on this by charging a small fee [about $2] for a whole song to be downloaded with the words flashing across the screen so people can sing along karaoke style," Northcott said.
It's difficult to quantify how many people use ring tones, but customers of one company, Premium Wireless Services, which launched its service last year, have downloaded more than 60 million songs, with American customers accounting for about one-fifth of that number.
