It’s not a phone, it’s a wedgie machine

Also: help me choose a ringtone!

I drove down the Fairfax County Parkway to the Fair Oaks mall yesterday evening and stood for at least half an hour looking at all the phones. The sensible choice would have been a Nokia 3390, which after my longtime-customer discount would have been mine for about twenty-five bucks. I like Nokias: the software is easy to use, they seem to have a long battery life, they’re usually pretty indestructible.

So: $25.00 price point + good software + long battery life + indestructible equals…

That’s right, I avoided the Nokia like the plague, hauled out my corporate card and plunked for the Samsung S105 (the T-Mobile version of the phone shown below.) Hey, it’s the dogs’ balls, what can I say? I actually wanted to like the Ericsson T68i, but I held it in my hand and it felt really, really cheap. Plus my experience with Ericsson software has been awful.

So: now I must choose a ringtone. The S105 has polyphonic ringtones; it’s got a little Casio keyboard built in, basically, and it can play music instead of ringing. In fact, it has to play music instead of ringing; it only comes installed with one “ring” (the T-mobile jingle), and the rest are all “Cuba fusion” and “Valse Fantaise” and “Please come beat me up now because my phone is so poncy.” I was actually despairing last night until I found the theme song to The Great Escape on a UK mobile phone site. Now instead of ringing, the phone plays a cheerful, bouncy, “Let’s outwit the Nazis and jump BMW motorcycles over barbed-wire fences” tune. Which is about all you can ask from a phone, really.

Here’s the page where I got my ringtone at www.mobiletones.com. If you click on the songs, you can hear the previews (and they basically sound exactly identical to that coming out of the phone.) Any suggestions for good ringtones? I can actually divide up callers into groups, so the phone plays different songs for different categories of people.

Note: I asked fellow [My employer] technologist Eric Savage for advice about what the coolest phone out there is to buy. He got so excited about the Danger Hiptop that he actually went out and bought one last night (in addition to his existing stable of phones.)