I used to be able to fit everything that I needed for the day into my pockets and didn’t have to carry a purse or backpack with me. These days that’s not the case. Now I carry a cell phone and a laptop and an mp3 player and a digital camera … and that’s just the bare minimum of what I might take with me when I head out the door. We’ve got a gadget for every job these days.

It isn’t just a problem that we have with personal "toys" either. I’ve noticed that office spaces tend to have a whole lot of gadgets that can all do basically the same thing. For example, the office that I work in has a guillotine paper cutter, an electric paper cutter and a business card cutter which are all tools that serve the purpose of cutting paper. (Of course, we have scissors as well.)

Luckily, it seems that we are heading towards a new trend of getting gadgets that are multi-functional. I’m pretty sure that the next cell phone that I buy will be able to play music, take pictures and surf the web so I won’t have to carry around the mp3 player, camera and laptop anymore. Hopefully the same thing will happen in the office and life will start to get less cluttered again for all of us!

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I find it interesting that the iPhone, a device that combines a cell phone with a device that plays music, still requires users to download ringtones.  This seems remarkably silly to me.  Why can’t the iPhone allow you to simply set downloaded songs as ringtones?

The answer is, of course, all about money: Apple makes more money if they charge extra for ringtones.  Basically, iTunes charges you a buck per song to take a song you already own and convert it into a ringtone — something you would think should be able to be done for free.  (After all, it doesn’t cost you anything to convert a CD audio file to MP3, WAV, or iTunes format — all you need is the software, which is usually free.)

If, on the other hand, you want a song you don’t yet own as a ringtone, it’ll cost you two bucks — $1 to buy the song, and $1 to have it converted.

Thankfully, there are ways to get around Apple’s greed.  There are a number of ways to "hack" your iTunes and fool it into thinking you paid for your iPhone ringtones — evidently the file conversion is actually little more than a smaller file, a different file extension, and a different location in iTunes.  There are also a number of websites out there that offer free or cheap T-Mobile, AT&T, or Cingular ringtones.

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