Many of you have written to us in recent weeks to express frustration about not getting every ringtone you send to your phone. I wanted to let you know what is happening and what can be done about it.
If you never get ringtones from Phonezoo, the first thing to do is to see if you have some sort of spam blocker on your account. Contact your wireless company to ensure they are not blocking messages from support@phonezoo.com and from our shortcode – 69964.
However, the most common problem right now is that sometimes you receive the text messages, and sometimes you don’t. We’ve found that this issue primarily impacts Cingular/AT&T users. During peak periods, the wireless carriers’ messaging system seems to get overloaded, and they appear to just drop some messages without delivering them. This is why you sometimes don’t get a ringtone.
Believe me, we are working on technical solutions to this problem. However, as Phonezoo continues to grow, we expect the challenges to grow along with us. Right now we send hundreds of thousands of ringtones to people every day, a number that has grown rapidly since our launch last November.
So, what can you do about this? We have two suggestions:
1. If you don’t receive the text message with your ringtone in about 15 minutes, try sending it again. And if you can do it outside of peak hours – before 11am (Pacific Time) or after 7pm – your odds of success are much greater.
2. Even Better – get your ringtone without getting a text message. Did you know you can download a ringtone without getting the text message first? You can get any ringtone you’ve saved in MyZoo from our WAP site. (WAP means Wireless Access Protocol, or basically the way you get on the Internet from your phone). The process is pretty easy:
Step 1. Get on the Internet from your phone (launch your web browser)
Step 2. Enter our WAP Address: http://wap.phonezoo.com
Step 3. Login to your Phonezoo account (use same user name & password that you use on the website)
Step 4. Bookmark the page to avoid having to log in every time (first time only)
Step 5. Select the ringtone you want to download
Step 6. A page with ringtones in MyZoo will be shown. Select a link to start the download. Once the download has completed, you can save and configure the ringtone using your phone’s menu options
We encourage you to try WAP access – no more waiting for text messages to arrive (and it won’t count against your monthly text message limit either). Please note: WAP Access will not work for Verizon Wireless customers. We realize this is frustrating for many of you and we will keep working on it.
And for those of you confused about Cingular/AT&T or whatever they are called now, Stephen Colbert explains it all for us:
well
i was just surfing random sites and here i am.. its kind of shocking for me to read this post because i use http://www.mymp3tone.com to get my ringtones, and ive never ever had any problems of this kind..and maybe that because you can download it throuhg WAP instead of the text message thingie…so its got a better chance at downloading your tone…
I agree – for people who know what they are doing, WAP can be an easier option. No waiting for a text message. That’s why we encourage people to try that method in the post. However, there are some conveniences with sending a text to your phone as well – no need to enter a long URL, log in and surf to the ringtone you just sent. This is why we give people a choice.
There’s a few things you should be careful of when checking out other ‘free’ ringtone sites. First, do they format ringtones in a way that is compatible with your phone? If your phone supports .mp3 format, maybe it will work. But we know that many, many phones do not support .mp3 ringtones. Almost all Sprint phones use another format, and many phones from other big US carriers like AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon do as well.
The other thing to be careful about is copyright detection. Do these free sites automatically check to see if files are copyrighted before sharing them with others, or do they put the responsibility on you, the user? We’ve implemented technology to prevent mistakes and respect copyrights when you upload music to make a ringtone. You should look to see what the policy of other ‘free’ ringtone sites is so you can make an informed decision.
i’m curious if anyone has gotten it working on Verizon. I have a Samsung a950 phone, and verizon is supposedly supported, but all I get is messages with .wav files attached, and my phone says that that type of file is unsupported.
my ringtones havnt been sent for like a week now. i was wondering what was up. i miss getting free ringtones.
i really think we should get ringtones without getting a text message or using a pin code. my mom took our enternet bc of the younger kids we all share a plan and she also took text messages
please help us out and give us ringtones
I read your posts for quite a long time and must tell that your posts are always valuable to readers.
found your site on del.icio.us this week and truly liked it.. i bookmarked it and also will be back to see it clear out some more later ..
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