Andre LouisListening to old Nokia ringtones from the N95, which was the last phone I got near the end of 2007 and being way more impressed by the quality compared to most of today's offerings from the big companies. Apple, Samsung, Google etc, you have a lot to learn and you've had years to do it. Still not impressed.
x0@FreakyFwoof If you're talking about the trend towards minimalism, I wonder if the existence of the iTunes ringtones store and whatever Google's equivalent is is a reason for that? After all, why ship great ringtones with the phone if you can buy them, and the vendor gets a cut? Did the Nokia and the like have something like this? Besides possibly loading your own ringtones onto it via computer?
miki@x0 @FreakyFwoof Nokia (like most other manufacturers back then) was very carrier-friendly, and most people would get ringtones via WAP. You'd send a text to a premium number and get a ringtone back via WAP push. You could find the right number and text to send on special websites, in newspaper ads, or sometimes even on the radio.
I've never actually done this myself, but have had multiple family members do it in my presence. That's what people did if they weren't into tech and didn't know how to use the fancy phone transfer cables and computer programs.
Since these weird retro communication protocols definitely peak my interest, I've done some reading about how this stuff was implemented on a technical level at one point, and it was essentially a WAP URL specially encoded as a text message that your phone could interpret. It would then connect to your carrier's WAP gateway through whatever brarer it supported, and that gateway would translate the quaint WAP protocol to ordinary HTTP over TCP/IP and speak that to the remote server. There's more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_ProtocolPush