Sunday, January 13, 2008

Ringtones

Personalised ringtones? No, if you were to call my Sony-Ericsson K750i mobile phone, it would ring like an old-fashioned circular-dial telephone. That is, until now.

I was working away on some project firefighting at Canary Wharf when the Prelude in C Major from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier (Book 1) sounded out. You might have heard Catherine Zeta Jones' character playing it in Entrapment, with Sean Connery: listen here.

A tough, trouble-shooting colleague of mine, Vince, noticed my glance of recognition, and looked meaningfully at his mobile phone. No words were spoken, but I knew it was show-time.

OK, well I have a personal favourite as well - the Fugue in D Major nine tracks further on - listen here. It's Glenn Gould, by the way, and I have to not-answer the phone a long time to get the full value of this beautiful piece.

I have to say the K750i manual seems to have been written for another device entirely - it took me ages to discover how to get the Fugue mp3 file to work as the ringtone. But I figured it out eventually.

Inspired by my success, I decided to review and improve my voicemail greeting. I managed to turn the pin function on by accident (I have of course forgotten the pin) and as a consequence, I can no longer access voicemail on my phone.