Nokia Tries To Play It Cool With New Dubstep Ringtone

OK, Nokia, we get it: you want to be cool. The Nokia/Monster headphones spotted a few days back was a start, but what better way to attract a hip young crowd than to jazz up your iconic jingle with some dubstep?

In fairness, Nokia didn’t actually design the thing themselves. Instead, they launched a contest last September where they asked people to submit fresh takes on Grande Valse, the Spanish guitar tune that’s been burned into every Nokia user’s brain since 1994.

The Finnish company received over 6,000 entries (some of which weren’t even ringtones, apparently), and a panel of 7 judges sifted through all of them to find a winner.

Valerio Alessandro Sizzi’s dubstep remix took top honors, and netted the 22-year old audio designer a $10,000 prize. On top of that, his submission will soon be baked into the software of 100 million Nokia phones, and may soon appear in a pocket near you.

In Sizzi’s own words:

“I just thought as a sound designer that a sparkling, up-to-date and with a certain coolness version of the Nokia Tune would have been perfect to attract young and “cool-hunting” customers.”

We’ll have to see about that. Nokia’s got a lot of work to do if they want to cast off their stodgy reputation, and a dubstep ringtone could go either way. In its defense, the ringtone is surprisingly catchy (at least for the first few times you hear it), but only time will tell if Nokia can gain some more traction among the younger set.