Pwning the iPhone: Giving Ringtones The 24 Treatment

A few weeks ago, I added the 24 ringtone (WMA format), which I’d first heard coming from a fellow attendee’s cellphone at a Linksys press event two months ago, to my Windows Mobile Smarphone. Yes, I’m a geek ;-). Last night, I did the same thing to my iPhone.

"But wait," you might be saying right about now, "I thought it wasn’t possible to add ringtones to the iPhone’s built-in suite?" Generally speaking, you’d be right. However, a few weeks ago some enterprising hackers figured out how to do this particularly ‘dirty deed’, using several homebrew utilities that they’d concocted. Steps 1-10 are here, and the remaining 11 (!)steps are here.

I’m fairly adept in OS X’s Terminal mode, but the whole process was just convoluted enough that I talked myself out of tackling it. I assumed that someone would eventually wrap a user-friendly GUI wrapper around the required programs, and it’s arrived in the form of the freeware (donations accepted) iFuntastic. This easy-to-use piece of software claims to also let you re-arrange your iPhone’s menu icons and change the carrier logo from ‘AT&T’ to a PNG icon of your choosing (iFuntastic’s developers even conveniently bundled a ‘pwned‘ image file), although I didn’t test these additional capabilities.

If you’d like to try following in my footsteps (with absolutely no implied guarantee of success!), note first that iFuntastic is Mac OS X-only, and v2.1 of the program is currently Intel-based Mac-only. Also, my iPhone refused to play the space-efficient M4A version of the 24 ringtone found at the link in this post’s first paragraph, I assume due to some codec incompatibility nuance. iFuntastic wouldn’t let me transfer the AAC version of the ringtone, either, but the MP3 (original version) file works fine. Also, iFuntastic is, at least as far as my limited testing suggests, compatible with the recently released v1.0.1 iPhone firmware update.