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 cell phones, especially the history of accessory features such as ring tones. Due to the remarkable development of mobile phones, users feel new desires and are exposed to new ideas and inventions, while many of them would like to focus on the development process. When asked how much they know about ringtone history, users may reply that they know nothing about it. Since we pay too much attention to trends instead of history, it’s about time we learn more about the history of ringtones.

The first commercial mobile phone with ringtones was the Japanese NTT DoCoMo Digital Mova N103 Hyper from NEC, sold in May 1996. It had some preset songs in MIDI format. Four months later, the Digital Minimo D319 became the first mobile phone in which a user could enter an original melody, instead of the default songs. These phones proved to be popular in Japan and the point is supported by the fact that the popular song company sold over 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 networking features like composing, sharing, and rating ringtones.

The history of ringtones is a history of innovation. New ideas are presented, while inventions are created one after another. The sales and marketing of ringing tones is a prime example of vertical convergence in telecommunications, as it is true that ringing tones generated more than $2 billion in annual revenue worldwide in 2005. Fortunately, users We benefit a lot from the remarkable development of ringtones.