PhoneZoo: Make Your Own Ringtones

Despite being enthralled with technology, I typically hang on to a cel phone until it becomes unusable. That is, it's lost, its battery life is pathetic and no spare ones are sold anymore, or it just won't turn on. My Samsung A460 (age 4?) replaced a Samsung 3500 when it broke, not because I chose it but because I have phone insurance, and 3500s were extinct by then. Both of these ought to be extinct -- monochrome screens, no camera, no SMS, text-only web-browsing, and bulky. I could have done the insurance route again when I lost my A460 a couple of weeks ago, but I found a deal online to get a brand new Motorola™ KRAZR K1m for nearly free.

Suddenly, I have features that everybody else has enjoyed for years! Mp3 ringtones, photo & video mailing, SMS, Google Mail, Google Maps, Skype (using a website called EQO) plus IM, games, and even television (if I want to pay Sprint™ a lot per month).

The nagging question on my mind today was how to get my own ring tones into this phone without paying $1-3 a song. Supposedly there are manual ways involving cables and software. But then I found this website PhoneZoo that offers a YouTube-like service where you upload songs and have them beamed to your phone automatically. Cool! Also like YouTube, you can have your song listed for others to hear, though interestingly, the songs that you tag as "copyrighted" (which nearly all will be in some form or another) cannot be downloaded to other people's phones. Other folks can, however, listen jealously and upload their own renditions if they have them.

I can tell I'm not going to get a lot of sleep this weekend -- I'll be sifting through my modest CD and DVD collection looking for audio gems.