Phonezoo Blog

Phonezoo is pleased to offer the next great free thing for your mobile phone – games.  This week we launched over 1,000 games available for free.  In some cases, you may see ads from various companies before you begin playing the game.  There are games in many popular categories including puzzles, action games, casino games and arcade games.  New games are being added all the time.  The process to get a game is essentially the same as other content on Phonezoo – select a game, send a text message to your phone, and download the game from a link in the URL.  While we haven’t tested all the games on all of the phones, we encourage people to try them out and send us some feedback.  Unfortunately, these mobile games will not work for Verizon and Alltel subscribers.  These wireless companies have closed networks and do not allow these applications to be downloaded over their network and installed on their phones. 

Since we launched Phonezoo over a year ago, we’ve learned a lot about our users.  Two things that come across loud and clear is that people want what they want, when they want it, and people want it to be FREE.  So with that in mind, we asked ourselves “What can we offer people to help them make free ringtones that are more personal and more interesting?”  We started with the Voice Recorder tool, which enables people to record their own voice, make a ringtone and send it to their phone.  But now we are happy to introduce something even more customizable.

Yesterday, we launched the “Build Your Own” ringtone tool (under the Ringtones tab).  Now you can mix and match different backgrounds, sounds and even your own voice to make a ringtone that is uniquely yours.  While this feature allows for limitless creative possibilities, we’ve tried to keep it very easy to use.  Here’s how it works:

·         Start by choosing one of our 10 backgrounds, if you want.  These represent different musical styles and serve as the foundation for your ringtone.
·         Then, record something using your own voice, if you like.  You can record something funny, something personal or just something interesting.
·         You can then add any number of different sounds to your ringtone.  With our drag and drop editor, you can put sounds anywhere within the ringtone.
·         Give your ringtone a name and send it to your phone

We will continue to add new backgrounds and sounds on a regular basis to keep the content fresh.

Though we perform a copyright check on these ringtones, we expect the vast majority to be able to be shared with others.

Please give it a try and let us know what you think.  We’d love to hear your suggestions for additional sounds to include.

For those of you new to Phonezoo, ModHacker has put together a 5 minute YouTube Video on how to use Phonezoo.  Very thorough and well done.

Today we launched the latest enhancement to Phonezoo – Phonezoo Photos.  When we started Phonezoo, our vision was to make it extremely easy for people to get custom ringtones on their phone.  And judging by the millions of people who signed up and come back to our site every month, we were on to something.  But why limit it to just ringtones?  Many of you wanted more.  So we have been working on adding other interesting, custom content that people can send to their phones quickly and easily. 

In the last couple months we introduced Voice Ringtones – ringtones you can record yourself – and Jokes.  Today we are happy to offer Phonezoo Photos.  The basic idea is very similar to Phonezoo Ringtones – just upload a photo from your computer, edit it if you like, and we’ll send it to your phone.  It’s very easy and of course, we don’t charge you anything.  You can rotate images and crop them if you like using our online editor.  And if you want, you can share your images with others so they can get them on their phones as well. 

We hope you find our Photo service interesting and useful.  We’d love to hear what you think.  Meanwhile, we are hard at work on adding other ways for you to get free, interesting content for your phone.  Look for more from us soon.

Have not had your daily laughter fix since the Daily show, Colbert report and the Tonight Show went off the air? Well, we have an answer for you. We have just added a new, exciting and fun section to Phonezoo – jokes! Browse through and listen to hundreds of jokes submitted by fellow Phonezoo users. Or even better – create one of your own. Its easy to record and upload a joke for every one to share and listen. Just like ringtones, you can also send the joke to your phone and save it to play when you are with friends.
We believe Phonezoo is a fun place to hang out with friends. So far you have created, listened to and downloaded ringtones – you can now do the same with jokes!
And if the Hollywood writers are reading this – feel free to post your creative works on Phonezoo. We will be happy to share the advertising revenue!

Just a quick note to tell you about something new on Phonezoo – Voice Ringtones.  You can now create a custom ringtone simply by talking.  All you need is a microphone hooked up to your computer.  To try it, just hit ‘Create Ringtone’ then record your own.  It’s easy and of course it’s free.  Give it a shot and let us know what you think.

You may notice that copyrighted ringtones – those with a © in front of the name – don’t show up in as many places on Phonezoo as before.  As of today, you can still see the copyrighted ringtones you made in MyZoo.  But you will no longer find copyrighted ringtones when you search or browse the website.

We have heard from many people who were confused about how to get a ringtone that is copyrighted.  Also, not everyone understands why some ringtones are marked copyrighted and some are not.  To keep it simple, we decided to encourage people to make ringtones using the ‘Create Ringtone’ tab, rather than try to figure out how to get a ringtone that is copyrighted.  The process to get any ringtone you want is still very easy – just click Create Ringtone, upload an audio file, select the portion you want and send to your phone.  We found that the vast majority of people made ringtones this way anyway, and this should keep the site clean and simple for everyone to use.