Which is the World’s Most Popular Mobile Ringtone

I recently published about the world’s most popular mobile phone. It was Nokia 1100 which sold about 250 million units. After this article, a friend questioned me about the most popular ringtone in the world. He is a mobile ringtone lover and wanted to know which is the most used ringtone in the world. No wonder he keeps on changing the ringtones!

So, I thought of telling you about the world’s most popular ringtone! A ringtone is the sound played by mobile phones when an incoming call is waiting to be answered. Before the mobile era, the telephones used to “ring” and the same etymology gave birth to the word ringtone.

Nowadays, we get to hear hear nice polyphonic ringtones all around us. Smartphones can even play vocal songs as ringtone when someone calls you. A large number of polyphonic and non-polyphonic tunes are available and users are spoiled with choices. But there was a time when one tune became ubiquitous symbol of an incoming mobile phone call.

This ringtone is called the Nokia Tune. It first appeared when the Finnish handset maker launched its Nokia 2110 phone in 1994. In the early mobile phones this ringtone used to be stored with the name Grande Valse. Sometime in 1998, the tune was renamed as Nokia Tune. This tune is actually a small portion of a guitar composition by Spanish guitarist Francisco Tárrega. The musician wrote this piece of music in 1902.

Notes of Grande Valse brilliante. The Nokia Tune composition.

So, how popular this Nokia Tune ringtone was? Well, it is said that in its heydays this tune used to ring a whopping 1.8 billion times every day (that means about 20,000 times per second!) around the world.

Nokia tune is also considered to be the first mobile phone ringtone that could be easily identified as a mobile ringtone. The company registered it as a sound trademark.

If we take into account the ever increasing number of ringtones and customers’ habit to keep changing ringtones -it is unlikely that any other tune will ever be able to challenge the position of Nokia Tune as the world’s most used mobile ringtone.

I hope this article was useful for you. Please share your experiences about Nokia Tune. Thank you for using TechWelkin!