More or less since cell phones were first released, people have felt the need to personalise them, and one of the most popular ways to do this is via custom ringtones.

Back in the day, ringtones were tinny sounding things, whereas today, they usually sound full and rich, because many phones, including, of course, the iPhone, are also MP3 players.

So that means you can choose almost anything to be your ringtone, and the more sophisticated phones will also let you choose a different tune for different people, so you will instantly know who's trying to call you (and whether you should therefore ignore them or not).

Most phones come with a range of built-in ringtones (for example, the iPhone ringtone library contains 25), but most people want to use action snippets of their favourite songs, for example.

There are three main ways you can add your own ringtones to your iPhone.

Firstly, and no doubt the way that Apple would prefer you to do this, you can buy iPhone ringtone downloads from their iTunes store, and they don't cost a lot of money. You could expect to pay under $1 USD for a single ringtone, or maybe $4 USD or more for an entire collection of hundreds of them.

Secondly, there are iPhone 3G apps you can get for your phone to help you compose your own ringtones - although this may not be the best option if you're "musically challenged".

And finally, you can buy third party software, such as Ringtone Maker, that will let you create iPhone 3g ringtone from YouTube videos, MP3 files, WAV files, MP4 files and FLV files.

Another option for getting your iPhone ringtone download is to join MyPhone Express as a Private Member.

For a small one-time fee (which is currently less than $50 USD, as they are running a 50% off special offer), you can not only download as many ringtones as you like from their large collection, but you can also download movies, music, images, games, applications and other stuff too.

And remember, there are no download limits with MyPhone Express, which means that one-time membership fee will pay for itself over and over again.

Whatever you decide to do, please remember: a ringtone that sounds good to you may irritate the hell out of the people around you; some comedy ringtones may be funny once (or twice), but they soon get very tiresome; and lastly, please choose a ringtone that fits your character - if you're pumping iron at the gym and your iPhone starts playing The Birdie Song, your macho image will be shattered for ever.