UNINNOVATE / Engineering At Its Finest

Custom Ringtones

While many modern cell phones allow users to upload and use custom ringtones, the iPhone does not have this ability. Users are limited to the default and rather limited set of ringtones that ship with the phone.

Apple’s future plans for custom ringtone support are not clear. Some users say that a “ringtone” option was visible in iTunes during the original MacWorld iPhone demo and predict that this feature will be added in a later update. Others say that AT&T or record labels may be discouraging Apple from adding this ability. Whatever the real reason, this is an essential feature that any phone in the price range of the iPhone should support.

Luckily for iPhone users, programmers gathered in the #iphone irc channel and around the globe have figured out how to use the recovery mode of the iPhone to access the file system and upload custom ringtones. Step-by-step instructions have been provided for both Mac users and Windows users.

Using the iPhone as a hard drive

Although Steve Jobs has often referred to the iPhone as “the best iPod we’ve ever created”, it lacks the ability to be used as a hard drive to shuttle files from one place to another. This ability was enabled in ever other iPod model.

Two workarounds for this limitation (both currenty Mac-only) have been developed:

• Ecamm Network’s iPhoneDrive is a $10 program that allows files to be copied to and from the iPhone. It is easy to use, but the iPhone’s contents can only be accessed within the iPhoneDrive application and only files added with the application can be accessed.

• iPhoneDisk is an open-source, developer-orientied application that allows the iPhone to be accessed as a regular hard drive directly from Finder in OSX. While this is much more powerful than iPhoneDrive, it is in the earliest stages of development and is not really meant for end users at this point.

Customize the iPhone’s main menu

Hackers have also discovered how to add, remove, and rearrange the icons on the iPhone’s main menu. The process is similar to adding ringtones.