Adding ringtones to the HTC Touch Diamond

The HTC Touch Diamond is an interesting phone - I will write up some notes once I have had a little more experience with it (it takes some getting used to!), but in the meantime here's how to upload your own ringtone to the device.

While the device prides itself on usability, this was not obvious and I had to revert to reading the manual - something I don't expect to have to do with a phone. In fact, I have probably had 15+ different phones over the last 15 or so years. In the early years, I always had to read the manuals, then I discovered Nokia phones. Guess what, once I had learnt to use one, I seemed to be able to use any model Nokia. Needless to say, I became a loyal customer for many years, plus no more reading of manuals!

So having to revert to the manual for my latest phone was a real blast from the past! To save you the trouble of reading the manual (page 233, I think), here's how to add a ringtone.

1. First you will need to browse the file system on the phone. The easiest way to do this is to connect the phone to your laptop using a USB cable. If you are using Vista, it will install the necessary drivers and then display a dialog box asking you what you want to do. Select "open a folder"


2. Navigate to \My Documents on the phone and create a folder in called \My Ringtones in the \My Documents folder.


3. Drop your ringtone files into this directory.


4. Go to the Settings tab on the phone.


5. Select Sound. And then on this screen, scroll down until you get to Ringtones. This throw me for a while since I hadn’t realised that it was possible to scroll this page. The lack of scrollbars was the missing clue.


6. Once you open the Ringtones option, you can select your ringtone from the list. Easy, eh!

HTC could have done a couple of things to have made this process a little easier:

1. Create a \My Documents\My Ringtones directory on the phone by default. This would have been simple and require no changes to the software, just a minor change to the build. This would have been enough of a clue for me to work out what to do. If you want to provide more of a clue, why not put a sample ringtone in it which would have then appeared in the drop down list of ringtones?


2. Even better, when selecting a ringtone, why not allow the user to browse to a different file location on the device? This is the usual way of adding ringtones on other phones that I have had, but for some reason is missing on this phone. Shame.