In yesterday’s press event, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced that the iTunes store will now sell pre-cut ringtones for $1.29. This is a big improvement on the old Apple model of paying for the song twice - the second time for the privilege of editing your own ringtone. Of course the 25,000+ users of Sharetones by DJ Nitrogen have found an easier and less expensive way to get custom ringtones from their music. With over 80,000 ringtone recipes in the Sharetones library, users have plenty of free choices without the need to edit their own.

Download a free copy at djnitrogen.com

AT&T posted their 3Q earnings earlier today. Not surprisingly, they reported strong gains from their wireless devision this quarter. AT&T saw 2.4 million iPhone 3G activations this quarter, with 40% of which were new to AT&T. As you can imagine, the company greatly values smartphone subscribers like iPhone owners due to the expensive data plans that have “significantly higher [average revenue per user] and lower churn than postpaid subscriber average.”

Rest of story is at iPhoneAlley.com

The Copyright Royalty Board ruled to keep royalties on CDs, downloads, online streaming services and ringtones broadly unchanged, imposing a “truce” between music labels, songwriters and digital music services such as Apple’s iTunes store.

Unlikely they’ll do so but it makes for a juicy threat.

This was reported today by Tech Crunch:

“Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics giant that produces the iPhone 3G for Apple, has ramped up production to 800,000 units per week, says a source close to Apple with direct knowledge of the numbers. This is “above current full capacity” and there may be some concerns with quality control.

Apple sold just 6 million of its first generation iPhones.

Foxconn factories will be able to ramp production up significantly over time, says our source. But at current sell rates, the company is producing iPhones at a run rate of over 40 million units per year, well beyond early estimates of demand for the product of 25 million over the 3G product lifecycle.

Apple is continuing to add countries - the iPhone is available in 23 countries today, and another 50 will be added this year. We’ve heard that Foxconn was initially told to expect sales of up to 40 million units in the first year, but that those numbers are being revised upwards sharply.

About 1 billion mobile phones were sold worldwide in 2007, says Gartner (Nokia sold about 435 million of them).”

Recent users of the DJ Nitrogen Ringtone Lab are more likely to be sync’ing their ringtones to an iPhone than to any other phone on the market. They also create and share the most ringtones. “iPhone users appear to be very happy with our Ringtone Lab for the iPhone,” says DJ Nitrogen CEO Chris Sindoni. “Our top users have each created over 30 ringtone recipes just in the last week, which indicates they like the easy sync through iTunes.”

The Ringtone Lab is fully 3G and 2.0 compatible. It’s free to download and try, works in any country and still features an introductory price of only $9.99.

Check it out at http://www.djnitrogen.com/iphonedownload.html