A cautionary note for parents -- bills for musical cellphone extras can add up fast.
Your teenager can end up dipping into his or her college fund to pay for all the things a cellphone can download.
There's ringtones, ringbacks, text-messaging, games, "wallpaper," and other new, almost magical services such as Song ID (you just hold up your cellphone to music and it, amazingly, identifies the song.)
Truetones, for example, are generally being priced at $3.50 per song, including the "handling fee," which doesn't include your phone carrier's download-fee for using your cellphone's web browser. Typically, that price is 5c per "k" of memory, if you don't have a package.
So the price of a ringtone comes out a little closer to six bucks -- for a snippet of a song you can download in its entirety for 99c on iTunes.
Kayla Wood, 16, a student at Father John Redmond High School in Etobicoke, has five polyphonic ringtones on her 2-year-old Samsung cellphone. Some of them are programmed to play when specific friends call.
"I like to personalize it. The Eve one I have for my boyfriend when he calls. My phone only fits five, but if I had a phone with more memory, I would download all the ones I like."
Money is definitely an issue, she says.
Everyone has 'em
"Everyone has cellphones now. Every kid's on them in the halls and stuff. In the caf and my library, there's always kids on the phone. And they all have ringtones. My friends download a lot of them and their parents are always mad at them."
Wood says she pays for her own, on a pay-as-you-go basis. Her weakness is text messaging. "I can go through $10 in a day. The most I paid in was $60, and that was gone in a week. The thing is, I'm never really home. If I didn't have it, no one could get hold of me."
Andrew Campbell, a 16-year-old student at St. Patrick Secondary, had his cellphone privileges taken away by his parents when he ran up a bill in the hundreds of dollars. "It was mostly downloading games and ringtones," he says. "I knew what it cost, but I didn't keep track of it. I had maybe 15 or 20 ringtones ... rock music mostly -- The Darkness, Rolling Stones, stuff like that. Whatever mood I was in, I used that as my ring that day."
