As I was configuring my home phone last night, I set a ring tone for my wife’s cell number. But there is a very limited choice of hard-coded ring tones, and it uses old audio technology, like a hokey old video game.
I wondered why you can’t get a phone for your house that has all the features of a cell phone. Can you buy a landline phone that you can load with polyphonic MIDI or MP3 ring tones, etc.? Seems odd that the market for that would be exclusive to cell phones.
The obstacle (which wouldn’t be too difficult to overcome) is that most home phones are analog, so delivering content (like a ring tone) is more difficult. There’s ways to do it, certainly: like when caller-id is sent over the line. But it’s not as easy as with a digital device such a cell phone.
If I take off the (black) shell on my landline phones, there are 2 brass bells and a little electromagnetic hammer that strikes them to give the ringtone. I don’t know how I could download anything that would modify that.
I can muffle it a bit by stuffing tissues into the bells, or change it to a two-tone effect by putting clay in one bell. But these are pretty minor changes to the ‘ringtone’.
The fact is that an awful lot of landline phones are still old analog phones, from many years ago. (They really built those Western Electric 500 series to last!) As long as they work, people see no need to change them.
My kitchen phone dates from about 1974. It was moved to a new house in 1979. Will soon be one third of a century old. My mothers’ kitchen phone was installed in 1948. The handset has been replaced once, after one too many times being dropped, but the phone itself is still the original. In the warehouse, my parents have a phone that was upgraded in the 1940’s I think – they added a box with a new-fangled ‘dial’ thing. It’s still working.
You can buy wireless phones that do have various ringtones. I expect there are now some available that allow downloadable ringtones. Probably rather expensive, though.
Even just a USB port that let you transfer sound files in would be cool…
Times are changing. It’s not a profitable venture. Less than half of the people I know have house phones at all and barely anybody ever actually answers it - it’s just an answering machine, pretty much.
Consider that cell phones cost $150 and up. Yes, the cell company will often subsidze that purchase for you, even all teh way down to $0, but they’re also chargin you $30 or 40 a month for something that costs them almost nothing (at the margin) to provide.
Notice that if you buy a cell phone and a plan from two unrelated vendors, you never get the phone for cheap.
Somebody could make a conventional land-line phone with a computer in it to store & manage ring tones & a screen, and a USB jack to interface to a PC for upload/download. The technology is trivial, or at least box-stock standard. And it’d have to sell for $150 too.
Would you buy a $150 single-line wired deskset telephone?
Me neither.
I did not explicitly mention it, but of course the user would have to get a new phone, which would have to have an electronic ringer, which I’m sure are dirt cheap these days. Then, digital ringtone data could be sent down the analog line, much like caller ID data is sent now.
There’s no technical reasons this could not be done, I guess they just haven’t judged the market to be worth it.
If you are someone that leaves your PC on all the time, I’m sure it would be trivial to have your computer play a particular MP3 or .wav file when a certain number was seen on the modem’s Caller-ID. I’d be surprised if a program that does this was not already available.
Even if you have broadband, you could still hook up the modem for this purpose only.
You can get basic brand-new cell phones, unsubsidized, for MUCH less than $150 bucks if all you want is a phone with ring tones. With a quick web search I found one for £32.00 (I think about $40 US). There’s likely cheaper.
And the hypothetical “digital ringtone” phone that uses the analog line would be much cheaper still, since wireless connectivity and miniaturization would not be needed. My rough-ass guess is that they could sell this type of phone for 30 bucks or less.
When I was using my wired phone more than I do now, I had a $20 bought module that went between the wall and the phone which could be programmed to play one of about 6 diferent tones/tunes. I used Beethoven’s Fifth DAH DAH DAH DAHHHH. I fergit the other choices as it’s been in a packing box since I moved 6 muntz ago and I have the wired phone for my DSL. I think I got the module at Radio Sh*t.
The market just isn’t there. First, most of the people buying fancy new phones are buying cells anyway. The segment of the market that is satisfied with a landline is largely also the segment which is satisfied with a basic ringer. Second, there’s not as much need for different ringtones on a landline: With cellphones, they serve a very practical purpose, since you’ll often get many cellphones in a single room, and you want to be able to tell which one is ringing (at least, whether the one that’s ringing is your own). But you’ll very rarely have multiple landlines together, so a single phone-ringing sound is enough. Certainly, there are some people who would want one, but apparently not enough.
The converse is also true - why can’t I get a cellphone with just the numbers, speed dial and an on/off switch? I don’t want any video games or ringtones, but I’m in the minority as far as the cell phone buying market.
Probably because there is almost zero cost in adding the other features to the cellphone – the CPU is already in the phone, and has spare cycles to do this stuff. So the manufacturer adds as many bells & whistles to the phone as they can, hoping that each one might attract just a few more buyers.
Also, people very rarely decline to buy something because it has extra options they don’t plan to use – they just turn those options off. I’d think you could turn most of the ‘extra’ options on your cellphone off (though it might take some study of the manual to learn just how to do so).
Oh, it was more a point of argument than a question. I can avoid the excess features without too much trouble but I can’t get a sturdier phone with bigger buttons (the flat panel style makes for slow, imprecise dialing) and a game boy style on/off switch that would work with my provider (at least on the mass market).
Parade magazine (a national part of the Sunday paper) is advertising one of those now. It is just a cell phone with nothing much else with big buttons and an on/off switch. I would imagine there is a marker for it among the older generations.
I’ve seen ads on TV for these. They are indeed being marketed to older folks. A selling point seems to be the big help button that automatically calls the helpline.
It also beeps a warning when “Matlock” or “Murder She Wrote” is about to start.
Yikes, sorry for the hijack.
Are you folks referring to one of these or one of these? Anyone know a brand name or model?
I admit I’ve had a cell so long that there are things I want to hold on to, but it’s good to know stuff like this is out there. I would love a combination of the two that runs on cingular.
I think it might have been the Jitterbug I saw on TV. One of the features it touts is
which is probably the help button I recall from the ad.
I bought a Dell in 2000 that came with software installed that seemed to do just that (I say seemed to because I only played around with the software for 5 or 10 minutes, never used it). From what I remember, the ring was a WAV file, which would be easy to change, and it even had some type of fax software so you could use your PC as a fax.
WRT landline phones, if you consider the new IP phones ‘landline’, I know some of them have a bunch of different cellphone-type ringtones; my office is moving over to them group by group, and you can generally tell which group has just gotten the USB phones by the cacophony of dueling ring sounds as the office drones test out all the wacky sounds their phones make… come to think of it, I am not sure that they are downloadable, as my group doesn’t have them yet, but I have heard some tones that sound completely ‘non-standard’.