Cell Phone Ringtones

Whereas older telephones simply used a pair of bells for the ringer, modern cell phone ringtones have become extremely diverse, leading to cell phone personalization and cell phone customization.

Newer cell phones allow the users to associate different cell phone ringtones for different phonebook entries. Many also allow users to create their own cell phone music ringtones, either with a "melody composer" or a sample/loop arranger. Often these are native formats only available to one particular cell phone model or cell phone brand. However, other formats of cell phone ringtones, such as MIDI cell phone ringtones or MP3 cell phone ringtones, are often supported; they must be downloaded to the cell phone before they can be used as normal cell phone ringtones. Commercial cell phone ringtones take advantage of this functionality, which has led to the success of the cell phone music industry. Southern Rapper Chamillionaire was the first to have a cell phone ringtone go 3x Platinum for the hit single "Ridin".

The latest innovation are the singtones, a type of karaoke cell phone ringtones where users' voice recordings are adjusted to be both in time and in tunes and mixed with backing tracks to make user-created cell phone ringtones.

An alternative to cell phone ringtones for mobile phones are vibrating alerts. They may be useful in noisy environments, in places where cell phone ringtone noise would be disturbing and for the hearing impaired.