Well, I’ve finally replaced my old Nokia 6160 cell phone. The new phone is a Nokia 8260 in Electric Blue. It’s much smaller and lighter but has all the same features. I would have liked something that combined cell phone and PDA functionality but there’s not much available in the US like that yet. Maybe something along the lines of the Nokia 9000 will be available here within another year or so.

Like most phones, my new one supports programmable ringtones. And, unfortunately, also like most other phones, most of the available ringtones are not ringtones at all – they’re very lame musical melodies. My opinion is that anyone with a phone that plays a melody instead of ringing should be fined and have their phone confiscated. It’s highly annoying. It’s also annoying that while my phone documentation claims that there are 40 different ringtones available – there are in fact only about 5 ringtones and 35 obnoxious ringmelodies.

It is possible to download new ringtone data through SMS and there are plenty of web sites out there that claim to offer replacement ringtones (none of them actually do, of course, they only offer ringmelodies). The ringtone data is sent using the RTTTL protocol, so my new personal quest is to implement some actual ringtones and download them to the phone. I’ll probably put them up on a web page somewhere on the off chance that there are others out there who think it would be cool to have alternative ringtones for their phones. Maybe the Star Trek communicator boatswain wistle or the sound of the hotline on Our Man Flint. Maybe even the bonus life sound effect from the Robotron 2084 Arcade game. Now those are the sorts of things I would consider alternative ringtones. Hmmm… I wonder if a WAV to RTTTL converter is possible? I’m sure it couldn’t be done with enough resolution to reproduce complex sounds but simple sound effects might be possible.