Dear Apple
In Australia, the iPhone has been embraced with fervour. Far from its roots as a stylish, reasonably capable phone for Apple customers, it’s now been adopted as the standard in desirable mobile [cell] phones. I am never the only person on the bus or train carriage with an iPhone. I’m rarely the only person in the lift with one. Sometimes, I’m not even the only person in my apartment with one - and I live alone, and I don’t receive visitors.
Although Apple allows the use of custom ringtones - including ringtones for use with specific contacts - the fact that iPhone users are both restricted to a small set of stock SMS tones and a single new mail/voicemail tone, and rapidly growing in number, suggests that custom SMS and other tones must be enabled soon to prevent mass hysteria arising from confusion over ‘whose phone was it?’.
Nokia neatly solved this problem by making the default ringtone so iconically awful that users were highly motivated to change it as soon as possible.
The iPhone has been so well adopted that if an unfortunate person receives a message during a university lecture, in the ringing wake of the ‘huh-HEE-huh-HEE’ clown horn tone, half the class scrambles to check it wasn’t them.
My downstairs neighbour shares my SMS tone, and on more than one occasion I’ve woken with a start to a ‘DING DING’, only to be crushed with disappointment when no message awaits me, as well as ever-growing resentment towards my more-popular neighbour.
For the sake of avoiding those embarrassing situations when a new mail tone rings out on the train and 3 people simultaneously reach into their pockets to retrieve their phones, and then have to experience the embarrassment of pretending that they just happened to want to check on facebook or twitter or their other messages right then when everyone else in the carriage knows what’s really going on because they have iPhones too; for the sake of my professors’ virginal ears and short tempers; for the sake of my relationship with my neighbour (she’s kind of cute): please add the functionality for custom SMS and other tones.
Yours, etc.
