User:Stayaround
I did a bit of work on the ringtones article, maybe later I'll add some more;
A ring tone is the sound made by a telephone when ringing. The term is most often used to refer to the customisable sounds available on mobile phones. The facility was provided so that people would be able to determine when their phone was ringing when in the company of other mobile phone owners.
Ring tones, along with operator logos, have proven a popular method of personalising phones — an industry has popped up to tailor to the needs of people to customise their phones, and newer phones include features to allow users to create their own tones. Many people enjoy their personalization of the phones, but some find certain ringtones annoying in public and in certain public situations.
An alternative is a vibrating alert, especially:
- for noisy environments
- for places where ring tone noise would be disturbing
- for the hearing impaired
A phone only rings when a special "ring signal" is sent to it. For regular telephones, the ring signal is a 90-volt 20-hertz AC wave generated from the switch that the telephone is connected to. For mobile phones, the ring signal is a specific radio-frequency signal.
Types of Ring Tone:
1. Monophonic Ringtones Early phones had the ability to have ring tones programmed into them using an internal ringtone composer, later various formats were developed to enable ring tones to be sent via text using RTTL encoding,
2. Polyphonic Ringtones Many phones are now able to play the more complex polytones with up to 16 individual notes with different instruments played simultaneously to give a more realistic musical sound. Mobile phone handsets manufacturers have taken advantage full advantage of new technologies to improve speakers in order to produce a more superior mobile phone sound quality.
Todays poly ringtones are almost as good as the original records, the quality gets better all the time due to continuous improvement in mobile phone audio technology. Most modern mobile phones with play 16 track tunes. Whilst the early mobile phones that would only play monophonic sounds are still around it is only a matter of time before all mobile phone manufacturers produce handsets that play polyphonic tones. Polytones sound good and most hits are available to be transmitted in stereo to give up to 40 different notes playing at a time.