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
James Scholes@miki I once burned through £20 of credit (a lot for a young teenager) in about 30 seconds because of scammy premium-rate shenanigans. The TV ad said I could get a ringtone for £2.50 or whatever, but failed to mention (at least in an accessible way) that each incoming text would cost the same amount or more, and that they would follow up multiple times. @x0 @FreakyFwoof
@jscholes @miki @x0 I didn't quite have that experience but I had an EE mobile broadband device with *no* keypad or way to say 'yes' to a text, but I started noticing some nasty charges on that line which didn't make sense. got in touch with EE and they said 'yes, you signed up for a daily text from a company called GamesHaus.'
I did not say yes to receiving text. I could have done so on the website for the device but trust me, that was way more effort than it was worth. About £2/text, every day or so.
When I told them that this was a mobile broadband device *not* a phone, they had to backtrack, refund me the money and yeah.
I did not say yes to receiving text. I could have done so on the website for the device but trust me, that was way more effort than it was worth. About £2/text, every day or so.
When I told them that this was a mobile broadband device *not* a phone, they had to backtrack, refund me the money and yeah.
@FreakyFwoof @jscholes @x0 As an aside, I'm really sad that online payments via text didn't become more popular internationally .
They were a thing here, especially for smaller, online-only purchases like file downloads or coins in a game. You could also use them for subscriptions. One of our audiobook services still let you do that until very recently, because our traditional online payment methods don't do subscriptions and a lot of older people don't know what a CVV is.
@FreakyFwoof @jscholes @x0 Oh yeah, those were a thing.
When I was little, I remember people getting a lot of these scammy ads, texts and sometimes even calls, usually promising riches for sending just that one message, but it was never just one message in practice.
I remember one variant where they'd call you with an extremely simple, multiple-choice question which you had to answer via DTMF. Most people would answer correctly, and get a text informing them that they won and asking whether they wanted to get the reward. If you answered yes, they'd ask you what city to send the reward to, what street, what house number, what color, whether you'd like to receive it soon or later, whether you want a pamflet for their other services with your reward, what size you prefer, whether you're interested in other services they offered, and so on and so on. Of course, every question was a separate text that you had to answer if you wanted your reward, and all of them were quite expensive. You always thought that it was "just one more", and if you already spend so much money on it, you may as well finish the process and get your damn reward.
Most people would give up at some point and lose all that money, which is why this business was so profitable.