Upgrade your landline phone with ringtones

Your traditional landline phone doesn't have to be a bore. To give it a musical upgrade, all you have to do is plug it into a Ringboxx. Whenever a call comes in, the Ringboxx can be set to play your favorite song. Or if you prefer to know who's calling, you can set the compact device to play different songs for different people. Designed by Home Phone Tunes, the Ringboxx costs $80 and ships with 10 free ringtones. Additional sounds can be purchased online for about $2 to $3 each, or you can use the included software to convert your digital audio files to ringtones.

Stop Paying for Ring Tones

It's no secret that cell phones can now alert you to incoming calls with a musical ring tone. Songs sound better than beeps, and they're personal.
There is a catch, however. Buying ring tones can be expensive. Online stores typically charge more to send a song snippet to your cell phone than they do to download a whole song to your PC. Ring-tone sellers tend to tout compatibility they can't back up. Even if they sell you one that works on your phone and deliver it to you successfully, you'll still have to pony up more cash every time you want to switch your ring tone. And if you buy a new phone, you may not be able to use the ring tones you've purchased and loaded onto your old one.
Record labels love it when fans buy a ring tone of a song they already own -- the industry claims $4 billion in ring-tone sales to date. But in fairness, you shouldn't have to pay separately just to hear your CD tracks or legally acquired MP3s as ring tones.
In most cases, you don't have to. Putting a snippet of a CD track or MP3 file on your phone is actually very straightforward -- not to mention free, if you already own the song.

What Does Your Ringtone Say About You?

Forbes facts and stats article on the ringtone business also has a fun chapter on "what your ringtone says about you?". Always a huge favorite.
Research indicates that people do judge mobile users based on their ringtone. Earlier this year, U.K.-based carrier Tesco Mobile surveyed 1,000 customers and discovered that 21% of them thought having a standard ringtone was "uncool."
-- The survey also concluded that people who use their own recorded voice as a ringtone are self-obsessed, and that users who constantly change their rings might be flighty and unreliable.
-- If your phone plays a classic rock tune, you're showing your age, but you get points for figuring out how to change the ringer, Gramps.
-- If your phone is still playing "Jingle Bell Rock" in July, you're not going to impress people with your productivity.
-- If your ringtone is a current hip-hop or R&B hit, you're young at heart, but you're not particularly original. Hip-hop ringtones accounted for more than half of the $300 million U.S. market in 2004.
-- If your phone plays the sound of an old mechanical phone bell, you're not as funny as you think you are.
-- If your phone plays the theme song to a television show, you're not going to impress anyone with your intellectual acumen. Perhaps a Mozart or Beethoven ringer would do some damage control.
-- If your phone never leaves vibrate or silent mode, you may be the kind of important person who can't afford to waste time answering a phone call right now. Or maybe you just think you're that important. However, you may also be considerate and respectful, the kind of person we'd like sitting behind us in a movie theater.
-- Unfortunately, we tend to get saddled with seatmates whose phones play the popular "Crazy Frog," the clucking chicken, or any number of other annoying animal noises. If you're one of these folks, you may be a sociopath."