Please! Read through all the comments too before posting a question. Also–check your phone manual to see about downloading MP3s –sometimes it’s a phone issue. If your phone (Notably the Motorola W375 ) only allows mp3 downloads through the web browser, you can’t do it. Sorry.  And if your phone doesn’t have mms capabilities, you’re out of luck. Sorry again.

New possibly exciting news on the W375 front: A comment by our new hero, Rjay may have the solution to the Motorola W375 mp3 ringtone problem. I don’t have a Motorola W375 because I am way too cheap for that, but if you are not such a tightwad, please give this method a try and let us all know in the comments section how it works and I’ll update this post to include his instructions. Right now, I’m pretty hopeful!

Okay, on to the original post:

I got a new phone, new company. And I did not research my phone well enough–or the company. Everything went smoothly enough with the transition, number ported over, etc., although the wait was kind of long (not Net10’s fault, really). I’m happy with the price, I don’t want a contract, and the phone is nice enough. Nothing too fancy.

But I was quite annoyed to find that, although this is a web enabled phone, Net10 has the access blocked. Kind of a pisser. I was all set to upload my ringtones into the phone–and after paying for the web access, one minute standard deduction immediately, plus more as time ticked by–nothing. 404 forbidden error. Like I’m trying to hack into the Pentagon or something.

This is not advertised by Net10 by the way. They’ve got their own ringtones, and they charge 2 bucks each for them.

After two days–really, too much effort trying to solve this problem, and that obsessiveness is an issue I’m trying to deal with, but apparently not today–Crostel.com helped me figure a way around. Working through their site for a while, I found out that you can send anything you want to this phone– you just have to email it to yourself. Because multimedia messaging (mms) is unrestricted. Nice.

As is always the case, it’s quite easy, it’s just the getting there that’s so complicated. And it depends on the phone. Mine only takes polyphonic (midi files). There’s loads of those online, download away. Then email the file as an attachment to your phone via mms. From what I can figure, Net10 is piggybacking AT&T wireless, so first try (your 10 digit phone number) @mms.att.net and see if you get the message. Then you’ll be able to open it, download for a mere 2.5 minutes (25 cents) and save it as a ringtone. (Pics work the same way.) If that address doesn’t work, and you don’t know the stuff after the @ symbol, send a multimedia message from your phone to your email address. Your email will display the From address with all that helpful information in it. Just hit reply, attach your mp3 or midi or jpg and you’re good to go.

So now I got my (melodic interpretations of) Bone Thugs-N-Harmony on the phone, and I must find something more productive to do for the rest of the day.