It started with the Nokia Tune, which is a 13 note rendering of Francisco Tarrega's, Gran Vals, who was a 19th-century Spanish musician.

The first ring tones were monophonic, which mean that only one note is played at a time.

Some of the early cell phone models, had a built in ring tone composer. To compose free ring tones directly to the phone or to make them with a ring tone composer, never became a big hit. The year 2002 is a major milestone in ring tone history. Nokia 3510 was the first phone optimized for playing polyphonic ring tones. Soon other cell phone companies also adopted the MIDI standard that enables more realistic polyphonic sounds for ring tones.

The year 2003 was the actual breakthrough for polyphonic ring tones. Cell phone makers, operators and content providers also came up with new concepts and ring tone formats. Motorola introduced Groovetunes and Nokia introduced Nokia True Tones. ring tone web sites also started to offer voice ring tones with voices of celebrities as ring tones.

Today, with phones like The Sony Ericsson W800, Nokia N91 and MOtorolas iTunes phone, we could be facing a new milestone in the ring tone history. Polyphonic ring tones still rock, but as you can see from the short history presented above, things change. Today the internet is full of MP3 music, both legal and illegal, and you can use Bluetooth to transfer music files from a PC to your cell phone.