Since the first Nokia portable cell phone and the Nokia tune the portable phone industry has exploded, and also did the ring tones market. There didn't only come more customers to buy the ring tones but there was a huge climb in the technology behind ring tones as well.

The first Nokia tune was a simple monophonic ring tones with only one beep sound. Soon after the Nokia tune there came a lot of other monophonic ring tones and even real songs that were composed to monophonic ring tones. But the technology did not stop. Because some years after the first Nokia tune the first polyphonic ring tones came out. Polyphonic ring tones became a big hype and every one who had a portable cell phone wanted a new one that supported polyphonic ring tones. These polyphonic ring tones consist of more beeps than just one, so it sounds like a real song but without any singing. And the drums and the piano were very realistic. But after the poly phonic ring tones the technology behind ring tones slowed down a little bit. For a few years many corporations were looking to find the best quality ring tone sound with the least file size. But after a while the portable phone corporations started to create and use bigger memory chips in their phones, and upgraded the quality of the sound. So after a while it became possible to have MP3 songs on your portable phone and play them with good quality of sound. The first real tones are born…

But the first real tones weren't actually the real tones we use to know. Because it was a little bit too risky to set up deals with record label corporations to use their artists songs. Just because they didn't know if anyone would be interested in the real tones. And the portable phones that supported the real tones were very expensive and almost nobody had one. So the first real tones were actually called true tones. True tones are mp3 sounds of real things. Like a mowing cat or the mowing of a cow. You even had a Yahoo! as a true tone or a big burp or a fart. But eventually more people bought a MP3 supported portable phone as they became less expensive and those people actually bought those true tones. Free ringtones are very popular.  And eventually the market became bigger and bigger. The next thing after the true tones was the cover tones. Cover tones are the covers of real existing songs. But it was useless to make those because the product ional costs were very high and you still had to pay a lot of money to the record label corporations. So after the flop of cover tones the ring tone providers switched to real tones. Real songs of real artists singing.

But why did it took so long before the real tones came? Well, that is really easy to answer: money. The real tone providers had and still have to make deals with record corporations these deals go deep into the $100.000's only for the deal! After the deal you still have to pay for every real tone you sell! So it is really expensive to legally offer those real tones. And you have to make deals with a lot of record label corporations because there are a lot of artists at different corporations. So there just was not a big market for the real tones at first and the ring tone corporations had to wait until the big crowds got into the MP3 supported portable phones.

There are some negative things about real tones; the quality of the sound on your phone is most of the time not as good as the real song so you might hear a different way of the song on your portable phone than when you listen to the preview. Also, real tones are very expensive because of the high record deals. Real tones sometimes even cost two times as much as a polyphonic ring tone. And when you buy a real tone online you pay more for the real tone then when you buy the full song online!

But there are also some bright sides of real tones. Real tones are mp3 ring tones so they're the newest thing and you can really show off when you have one! Also the real tones of the future are probably going to be a lot less expensive because the market gets bigger and bigger every day. Also the portable phones of the future have better technology and better sound. There are even now portable phones which have about 4 gigabytes of memory storage and it's only going to be more in the future. So with real tones you can make turn your portable phone into a media system.

So the real tones might be a little expensive right now, but in the future they're going to be big, really big!.