Pros
Easy, central location, full-featured ringtone manager.

Cons
Plays Windows default tones simultaneously with Ringo selected tones with large Contacts database.

The Bottom Line
Ringo brings out the smart in your smartphone by making easy to configure ringtones for friends, colleagues, and family. With its ability to attach a custom tone to categories as well as its SMS custom tone makes Ringo a powerful ringtone manager.

• Overall: 4/5
• Ease of Use: 5/5
• Usefulness: 5/5
• Solidness: 3/5
• Price: 3.5/5

Recommended
Yes

Full Review
The one thing that has always cracked me up about these “smartphones” is their inability to easily customize ringtones. Heck, at first, they didn’t even have custom ringtones! Sure, Windows Mobile 5 and its smartphone counterpart has seamless integration with Outlook for photos of your contact, but nothing for the ringtone. Maybe the next full version in two years. Sorry, it’s a Microsoft thing.

Fortunately, the aptly named Ringo will drum up the right beat for your contact. Ringo makes it easy from one central spot to pick and choose your ringtones for your different contacts. You can also at a single tone to a group of people via your categories. As an added bonus, you can assign ringtones to people and groups for SMS messages as well.

Configuring the ringtone is a piece of cake. Simply open Ringo, and the Default screen appears. Here’s where you select your tone for anyone without a custom tone associated to their number. On the Windows Mobile version, click the Friends tab (selectable in the menu for the smartphone edition) and then click NEW and up comes your Contacts. Select the contact you desire to make a custom tone for and your next screen will be a tone selector for both the ring and SMS tones. In the Windows Mobile version, you can listen to your selection after choosing it by hitting the play button and the selection automatically plays itself in the smartphone edition after selection is completed.

In my use of Ringo, I did find one odd problem that occurred with my large database. I have over 300 contacts and when someone calls, there will be a hesitation and then the custom ring will perform. But, nearly immediately after the custom ring plays, so does the default! Together. Kevin Vernon of Electric Pocket explained the problem to me as it’s in the way Microsoft initiates the playing of the tone via Windows Media player. In short, it’s not quick and smart enough to figure out another ringtone is already playing. Apparently, the large contact database adds a strain to the processor and thus doesn’t allow for both Windows Media player and Ringo to communicate to each other that one is taking caring of the job.

Overall
Ringo brings all the power and more of custom ringtones to your Windows Mobile and smartphone with absolute ease. With no need to open tens of contacts to customize how they notify you audibly who’s calling, Ringo makes life much easier. Adding the ability to give each category its own tone makes Ringo a one-up over Windows Mobile default customization. If you’re one like me with a large contact database, however, this probably won’t do you much good unless you like hearing two different songs at the same time. Hopefully Ringo can find a workaround for this problem. Finally, $20 seems a bit steep for this application where $15 would make more sense with $10 being the perfect sweet spot for price.

Price
$19.95

Platform
Windows Mobile, Windows Smartphone, Pocket PC 2003

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