Brinked describes itself as an Online Ringtone Community, it is a provider of free ringtones for most US based cell phone carriers. The ringtones are available in mp3, wav & m4r formats, which means that the tones are compatible with most mobile devices includinge the iPhone.

The home page provides a quick listing of currently featured ringtones, What’s Hot, Most Dowloaded, Most Recent.  This is a great way to see what is available in the library and get some ideas of what others are downloading.

If the suggestions there aren’t what you are looking for you can browse by Genre as well. Pretty much all genres are covered from Techno to Rock, Rap to TV & Movies and more. If the genres don’t offer what you are looking for the site also has a good search engine for you to use, simply enter the song you are looking for or the artist you want and it will return the appropriate list.

Where this site handles things a little differently is that it also has a RingTone generator. This allows you to select any mp3, wav or OGG file from your computer upload it and have it formatted as a ringtone.  Creating them as specific ringtones for your phone is a good option. The only downside I see to this is that there is no support for wma files (the native format for music files ripped from CD’s by Window’s Media Player). While this is a bit of a problem, all it really does is add an additional conversion step, there are free and cheap conversion sites and software that will take your wma files and convert them to any of the formats accepted by Brinked - it might be nice if they provided one of these on their site.

To download a ringtone it is necessary to setup an account, however, this is free and they only ask for the most minimal amount of information, which I thought was very good. To get the ringtone you have to provide your phones email address and the ringtone is emailed to you, you then download the attachment and use it as a ringtone. I have used ringtone download sites before and they usually download direct to your phone or are sent as SMS/MMS messages which makes them easier to handle.

Having found music and registered and downloaded the ringtone, Brinked goes one step further by providing users with a Forum.  For the most part the Forum doesn’t seem to have generated a lot of use so far, which I personally think is a shame and a missed opportunity. If the forum were promoted more on the home page I think they would get more from it.

The Forum is broken into two main categories - Help and Discussions with a third giving forum stats.  I like the idea of the help being in the forum area as this does start to provide the users with a sense of the community that is used as the website description. The downside of this is that most of the “help” seems to come from other users and there seems to be none from the website owners, which should be addressed.

Overall, if you are looking for a ringtone, don’t mind having to go through a few hoops to get them and want them for free then this is a pretty good site for achieving that.