Sunday, January 13, 2013

Ericsson T39 "Increasing" Ringtone (retro)

Buying my first cellphone was an ugly experience.  The year was about 2000 or maybe 2001 (I was pretty late to the party) and I *had* to have this baby -- the Ericsson T39.

Still today, I am still stunned by the design of this little Swedish beauty, with it's stubby little antenna and dot matrix LCD.

I purchased the phone on eBay for somewhere around $400, because it was no longer available at the cell carriers around here.  When I received the phone, I ran down to T-Mobile and activated my phone and got my first (and still current) cell number.

Things were great for about a month or so, and then one day the LCD simply displayed "NO NETWORK".  I tried everything to get the phone back into working order, including sending it to a company in California that flashed the latest and greatest firmware onto the phone for me, but to no avail.  From what I read on the interwebs at the time, the "NO NETWORK" bug was pretty common and it could be handled under warranty.  The problem was that, having purchased the phone on eBay, I could not prove that I was the original purchaser and thus I was not entitled to any warranty.

Well, that was that.  I ended up getting a crappy little Motorola candy-bar phone on eBay to replace this one, it worked fine enough for me though.

In the meantime, my favorite ringtone from the T39 was one called "Increasing".  Before I auctioned the phone on eBay as 'broken' for about $50, I recorded the ringtone as .wav and I still use it to this day on my Android smartphone.

Here it is.  Enjoy it.  It definitely would be considered 'retro' by today's standards, but you can hear this ringtone even when your phone is in your pocket.



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