Routine Order

There are many websites that allow you to download ringtones, and most of them offer a free ringtone as soon as you sign up. So how do these companies make a profit?

Selling ringtones and call-back tones (which is what your callers hear when you haven’t picked up the phone yet) is a $2 Billion market in the US alone! Most of these websites are affiliates for some other business that makes their bread and butter selling cellphone services, like ringtones. These services often have tie-ups with specific cellphone carriers, such as T-mobile, or Verizon. Now the way they make money is, somewhere in the subtext of the agreement you hurriedly click through on the way to downloading the free ringtone, you agree that the company will charge you for a monthly subscription through your carrier. That’s right, even when they don’t have your credit card, they still can charge you through your phone bill. The carrier profits, the company selling the service profits and the website which sent you their way profits.

You can also profit - the trick is, instead of fishing for free ringtones, if you really are interested in getting a great ringtone, sign up with a good ringtone download site, and be aware of the subscription. After you get the ringtones that you need - maybe within a day or a week or even a month, just call your service provider, or the company you got the subscription from to cancel the subscription - of course, to do this, you need to write down or otherwise remember the details of the subscription and also find out before signing up what the exact procedure for letting go is. Most service providers allow you to cancel by sending a text message with “quit”, “stop”, “cancel” or “unsubscribe” in the message. For example, if you sign up through my ringtones hub, you will be getting the service from Blinko, and their terms clearly mention how to manage your subscription:

For help, text “HELP” to 42222 at anytime. To cancel your service, text “STOP” to 42222 at anytime. For questions, please contact Blinko’s customer service at www.Blinko.com/care or call 1-800-971-2271.

Find these things out before you sign up. Knowledge is Power - know what you are doing, and don’t be a jackass by expecting the world for free.

The world’s first fully touchscreen Phone is not the iPhone (which I wrote about earlier). It is LG’s Prada phone.

Image Credit: Mobile Phones

Ooh, doesn’t it look sexy? The phone is limited to tri-band GSM 900/1800/1900 with EDGE data, and so will not be too popular in the US from the get-go. It’s smaller than the iPhone and it has a 2 megapixel camera (with Schneider-Kreuznach lens and LED flash). It is also Bluetooth 2.0 enabled (what phone isn’t eh?). It’s already listed as a top-seller at the UK mobile phones site. It totally sucks to be in the US of A, for those of you who are there. First there was the Nokia N95 which became popular in Europe way before it was launched in the US, and now this. The US has some serious technology lag, except when it comes to junk like the PS3 which hit the stores in the US first.

Forget the iPhone, I am drooling over this baby - the Nokia N95 smartphone.

The N95 has a 5 MegaPixel camera (oh, and by the way did you know that Nokia, not Canon, or Kodak, is the largest producer of digital cameras in the world?!!) which pretty much means I won’t need a seperate camera phone. It’s got wi-fi, bluetooth, and has a cool slider design - I much prefer sliders over flipphones and candybar phones. What has me really excited about the phone is that it is a Symbian smartphone as well. The only downside I can think of is that it does not support 3G. 3G be damned, I say - this cool phone will allow me to browse the web, check email, take pics, and, oh, it will let me make calls.

The Nokia N95 is already available in the UK with orange, and even T-mobile. So how long do I have to wait before it is launched in the US? I am out of contract now, and would gladly switch carriers (or stay with T-mobile) to get my hands on this one - I bet it will stay good enough for another 2 years.