rewrite this title What ringtone are you using on your phone?

It wasn’t that long ago (at least, what’s a couple decades between friends?) when there was no higher form of phone personalization than the custom ringtone. Over the course of a few short years we went from simple blips and bloops, to polyphonic recreations that were at least recognizable as actual songs, to straight-up MP3 ringtones. And after scaling that mountain… we all sort of just moved on?

At least, ringtones are no longer the status symbols they once were, a shift no doubt sped along by the way so much of our communication has shifted to text-based (who knew that having an actual, usable keyboard interface could be such a game-changer?) forms, including just the rise of social media as a whole. But while we may receive a lot fewer calls than we used to, that doesn’t mean we’re at all hurting when it comes to ringtone options — if anything, you’ve got more and better choices now than you ever did with your flip phone.

Really, it probably comes down to both just how heavy of a voice-call person you still are, and how much effort you really want to put in to keeping your phone feeling fun. If you take the time, you could go through all your contacts and assign them each personalized ringtones, so you know exactly who’s calling the second you hear those first few notes. Or you could keep your phone updated for the season, swapping your ringtone out for some holiday music.

In the end, there’s no wrong way to do it. You’ve probably got some favorites among your phone’s stock ringtones, and if one of those easy options works for you, why bother putting any more thought into it? If you do want to go the custom route, the sky’s basically the limit, and if you can imagine it, you can probably make it happen.

So where does that leave you? Are you still as gung-ho about ringtones now as you were the day you first learned to play Snake on your Nokia 3110? Do you still take the time to choose a good one when setting up a new phone, but rarely revisit that selection? There are probably just as many approaches to working with ringtones as there are ringtones themselves, so head on down to our comments and let us know what your own relationship with ringtones looks like.