Landlines and cell phones have different ring tones. While most landline phones have only one ringtone (the familiar brrrrrring sound), cell phones give you a lot of options. The standard ringtone of landlines phones are rapidly becoming a thing of the past as more and more people make the transition to cellular.

Cell phone ring tones are commonly used to customize phones. Many cell phones are sold already loaded with a variety of ring tones; a lot of people just stick with the default ring tone, however and whenever their phone rings it makes the same old sound.

There’s no reason to stick with that one boring old ringtone though. There are a few different types of ringtone you can choose from. There are the very basic, one note at a time monophonic ringtones, polyphonic ringtones, which play several notes at once for a richer sound and the more popular true tone ringtones. These ringtones are clips of audio files (either MP3 or WMA format) of about 15 seconds in length. One great way to customize your cell phone is by assigning a different ring tone to each caller.

You see ringtone promotions everywhere these days; offers of a free ring tone in exchange for signing on to an email list or other conditions. However, you can get these ringtones for a mere 99 cents, which if you ask me is a better deal than signing up to get a deluge of email. If your phone has a recording function, you can even make your own ringtones by recording a sound, even the voice of the caller you want to assign the ringtone to.

You carry your cell phone with you everywhere – why not customize it to make it more personal? There is certainly no shortage of ringtones out there -you can easily find one for every person on your contacts list. Pretty much any song you can think of is available as a true ring tone.

On my own phone, I have five different ringtones. One is for my wife, another for my (very precocious) nine year old daughter who just got her first cell phone, another one for my best friend. Knowing who is calling you saves you the trouble of picking up the phone for a wrong number or a person trying to sell you something.

It’s fun to pick out ring tones for the different people on your SIM card. People always talk about how technology has made the world a more impersonal place – well, cell phones are one aspect of our tech-obsessed culture where creativity and personality are alive and well!

There are a lot of websites which sell ringtones either on a pay-per ringtone as well as on a subscription basis. When looking at subscription sites, make sure that they offer ringtones that you really want so that you’re not stuck with a bunch of ringtones which really aren’t to your taste.