As your eating lunch with your friends at a nearby cafe you hear the theme song from Ironman go off. As you are wondering where it is coming from one of your friends reach inside their pocket to take out their AT&T iPhone and begins to talk. And you are thinking to yourself how you can get that same ringtone because at that moment you thought it was pretty cool.

Ringtones have come a long way since its first ring. Then again I wonder if you can consider the so-called ringtones as a true ringtone because the newer ones do not use tones but instead are true sounds from MP3s or some other audio file to create complex music.

The first ringtone basically sounded much like a normal ground line, which today are now just as complex as the cellular phone ringtones. But the first ringtones were just a bell and a hammer being electromagnetically being driven into it to create that ringing sound. Ringtone on the other hand are not done physically but electronically with a speaker built inside the phone.

Once cell phones were getting really popular, when a cell phone rang people had trouble from whose phone it was from because they were all similar and so people began to get ringtones that were different from one another. With this people began to get more and more unique and would get ringtones from bands or theme songs that they liked.

Phones also come with a feature in which it can play a different ringtone depending on who is calling. You can the people in your phone under a certain group, like for example let's say you have three different categories which are family, friends and work. The people in your phone fall into one of the three categories that you set inside your phone. If someone from work calls it will play a certain ringtone and if someone from family or friends call you it will play a different ringtone that you already preset. This can help people screen calls by audio so you know who is calling.

There are three different types of ringtones available right now. The most basic one is known as the monophonic ringtone. This ringtone consists of only 1 note people played at a given time. This is the simplest ringtone you can get on a cell phone. The traditional ring is also a monophonic ringtone because only one note is played at any given time for the duration of the ring.

The second type of ringtone is the polyphonic ringtone. This ringtone is basically much like a midi file. Instead of only 1 note people played at a given time a polyphonic can play multiple notes at a given time and can play all kinds of music.

The final type of ringtone available today is the truetone. Also known by realtone, mastertone, superphonic ringtone or audio recording it is the probably the most common ringtone used by people today. By either using a MP3, AAC, or a WMA file you can use that as your ringtone. Such as an MP3 of your favorite song, someone's voice recording or anything like that, you can use it as your ringtone. This is the only ringtone where you can use someone's voice in part of the ringtone because the previous two only accepts notes.