Over the past few weeks my wife’s cell phone has been acting funky. It’s rebooted, not received calls/voice mails until days later, made calls randomly while being in her purse or at home (and its a flip phone so there’s no chance the buttons were pressed accidentally). Long story short, she needed a new phone and was long past her contract renew date – so she could get anything for a pretty reasonable price.

I tried to convert her to the land of the blackberry but she was having none of the Pearl; even though the Alltel salesman claimed it was the “best phone ever made” which I chuckled heartily at.

She ended up going with an LG Banter – which is basically a reincarnation of the LG rumor sideslider with a full keyboard. The phone is actually very nice and I’m a real fan of the full qwerty keyboard and slider action. But most of all I found myself really digging all the pre-loaded factory ringtones.

I started to try and get these ringtones over to my own Blackberry via MMS message, but was greeted with a “Not supported” when I tried to attach the files.

I paid 1.99 for a 1 day internet pass on her phone, pointed the “browser” to my gmail and tried to send myself an email. No ability to attach a file with that hacked down browser.

I connected the phone via bluetooth to my laptop and tried to use audacity to record the audio as I played the different ringers. It wouldn’t work no matter what.

At this point I was completely PO’d and was doing anything and everything I could think of. I put my SD card into her phone but there’s no option/function built in to copy existing files to the card… I could only save new ones.

I finally took an old headset, cut the wire, and spliced that into a normal headphone jack to plug into the line-in port of my computer. This time instead of audacity I tried Windows XP’s sound recorder. It actually worked somewhat by recording the keypress sounds; but the ringtones wouldnt record.

I just couldn’t believe it. I can’t believe that a company would go to such great lengths to prevent somebody from copying the stock pre-loaded ringtones. Even now it totally makes me want to throw the phone out the front door and drop kick it across the street.

So, I resorted to scouring the internet and looking for any normal type of ringtone. I hate song based ringtones – I am in search of plain, clean sounding, simple ringtones. But it’s pretty dang hard to find those types of ringtones. If anyone has any ideas please let me know.

As of now I copied the Skype default ringtone to my phone and am using that even though I’m not a huge fan of it… blargh.