Cell Phones and Ringtones, Oh My!

I am constantly hearing about downloading ringtones to cell phones but the manual for my Motorola V180 does not cover that; although the specs state unequivocally that it is capable of having ringtones downloaded.

I plugged the phone into a USB port through a cable and the computer (HP Pavillion w/ XP) recognized the phone by name and model. It did not, however, install the hardware and gave the standard obligatory failure message.

I went to drivers.com and was able to download a driver for the Moto V180 and the hardware installed very nicely; but .......... now what?

There is no indication that a phone is connected to the computer. With cameras, etc., the computer sees the memory as a virtual drive and it appears as the next available drive number in Windows Explorer. Not so, this beastie.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to download ringtones to a phone? It is not like there aren't a virtual (pun intended) plethora of them out there.

Any help would be appreciated.

 

To download ringtones to the handset, you have to do through your Wireless provider (ie Cell Company). What happens is when you go to their Multi-media site (Cingular - http://www-xl.cingularextras.com/fuel/enduser/portal/endUserHTMLDir?c1=1&dc=0)

 

By the by, I have T-Mobile. I forgot that part.

I read at one site that different providers have either open or closed downloads. If they are open, you can download from any site. If they are closed, you can only download from their site. I believe that T-Mobile was one of the open sites. My problem is I wouldn't know what to do either way.

I did find a test site that lets you determine if your cell phone is programmable at http://cellphones.about.com/od/ringtoneshowto/l/blringcompi.htm

They state:

Here is how to determine if your phone will let you add customizable free ringtones in a "do-it-yourself" manner, as opposed to many phones for which the only option is to go to a paid ringtone site.
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Then there is a series of selections to make that determination. Unfortunately, there was an advertisement obscuring the answer.