Cell phones started out as purely functional piece of technology, but quickly evolved plenty of fun frills to keep their users entertained. Today's phones have built-in video games, specialized background pictures, switchable faceplates and, of course, customizable ringtones.

There are different kinds of ringtones. Polyphonic is one which are encoded using MIDI or other formats but do not contain voices or instruments. Another kind were called "truetones" or "realtones" which are encoded with high fidelity formats such as MP3, AAC or WMA format. Truetones allow hi-fi recordings like vocals, to be used as a ringtone. The first format of truetones was AMR-WB. This format allowed the extracts from the original recording or master track to be used as a ringtone, whereas the others were purely instrumental. This is one of the reasons, why truetones have an edge over monophonic and polyphonic ringtones.

It is also one of the medium used by the music industry to generate revenue, as extracts of the labels are often released as tones before the singles, in order to promote the album in the market. But wait, here comes the latest which is called Video tones which is being the next best thing to have happened to the mobile phone industry. It is a combination of the MP3 music that is played when a user receives an incoming call or message and its corresponding visual film or animation clip. Video tones can be downloaded just like mobile phone ring tones.

Free ringtones and video tones are readily available from the web. Mobile users around the world gained from the use of the Internet for the free sharing of ringtones, wallpapers, themes and games. In fact, downloading and exchanging mobile soft accessories have become a favorite pastime for almost everybody.