January 14, 2008

As a web site, Cellware is still in it’s beta version but from what I have seen at the site, you couldn’t tell. It seems to be in full release to me unless they are going to be adding more features.

Cellware is a free portal for mobile downloads such as ringtones, wallpapers, video, games and applications.

In addition to being a download site you can also set up a profile and it starts looking more like a mobile social networking sort of place. Pretty cool actually. When you first sign up for a free account through Cellware it lets you invite your friends from several different services to come check it out, including MySpace, Friendster and Facebook. You can also import contacts from your webmail services as well.

Aside from the content that they have (and lots of other web sites have as well) there are several things that seem unique to Cellware. You can create your own ringtones right on the sight by uploading a file. Any music or sound file that’s on your hard drive can be uploaded and turned into a ringtone. Once it’s uploaded you use their ringtone editor to select the 20 second portion of the file that you want to keep, enter some information so that you can identify it and then save it. Then you just download it to your phone or even share it with your friends.

I have used several different sound editors to create ringtones from mp3’s in the past and it can be a pain. You have to get it the right bitrate and length and then use a program like Bitpim (which voids your warranty) to copy it over to the correct place in your phone’s file system. Cellware makes it pretty easy.

You can also use their mashup editor to mashup two different ringtones. You can put them end to end to make one long ringtone, or you can actually overlay the two. Very cool, particularly if you have an instrumental and a bit of cool spoken text or verse you want to combine. Another pretty neat option is to use their text-to-speech editor to turn text into a ringtone. They also have ringtones that contain your name or that of your friends. Nametones. Personalize your friends ringtone to the max.

One thing I did notice while browsing the Name Tones is that there are quite a few of them on the site. It would be nice if they would add links to each letter. It does let you jump five or six pages at a time, but that’s not exact. It also doesn’t let you change the view to alphabetical. It seems to be listed in order of upload rather than anything else. Of course I may just be slow on the uptake too. Their IS a search function. Once I searched for my name I managed to find four ringtones that contained it. Vain, aren’t I? Once I located the one I wanted and previewed it right there in my browser I then navigated to their WAP page from my cell phone browser, entered the download ID number and got it right on the phone.

Cellware has a pretty cool image editor as well to create and share your mobile wallpapers as well. It lets you add special effects, rotate and crop your images and then send it to your phone.

One thing you may want to check out is the fact that Cellware bases their business model on sharing their site revenue as well. As you create and upload content they share it with the content creators.

You can set up in your profile to view (or not view) certain content as well. Initially when you first sign up it only lets you see “G” rated content, which is a great thing if you have kids or teenagers that might access your account. You can choose from “G, PG,R and X” for your content viewing pleasure if you want to get a little racy with your downloads.

As more and more web sites are created as or convert to mobile sites for cell phone and smart phone use, the mobile content available will continue to improve as they have over the last couple of years. Go check out Cellware and see what I mean.