Forget personalized ringtones and ringbacks, the next tween obsession has arrived in the form of Push Ringer, which "enables a caller to push an outgoing ringtone to the receiving phone -- allowing the caller, not the called person -- to set the tone." We're assuming you're either elated or sighing mightily after reading that, but there's 7.7 million reasons why you wish you would've implemented it first. A group of deep-pocketed investors have sunk $7.7 million into Emotive Communications' flagship idea, which temporarily overrides the phone's preset ringer, and moreover, allows the recipient of the surprise sound-byte to "instantly buy a copy" if they so desire. Notably, this very service has already taken the VoIP world over, as Skype users are probably more familiar with the RingJacker concept. Now, who's down for inventing the Push Ringer Reverser to send a "you got punk'd" clip back at the egotistical sender?

[Via The Raw Feed]

Some of us here at Engadget Mobile have been known to load the occasional Super Mario Bros. ringtone on our handsets; maybe even a Birdo background graphic or three, we're not gonna lie. But that's as far as our modding efforts have ever gone, if you can really call that modding at all. It turns out that for some 86.4 percent of young folk between the ages of 16 and 18 in the UK, phone modding is practically a way of life -- and quite often, it's a rather comprehensive affair, according to a study commissioned by British carrier Orange. We're not talking about ringtones or backgrounds anymore, folks; we're talking about bold moves like applying sparking glue directly over your display, as you see here. Orange estimates that modding is an industry worth over $55 million in the UK alone, and expects it to double in the next year (how much sparkly glue are these kiddies buying, anyway?). If we're going to spend this much time and energy in drastically altering the appearance of our phone, we're personally going to go the NES controller route, but more power to those teens who've decided they no longer need to see their phone's LCD.

[Via textually.org]

In a move sure to steal a few folks away from their carriers' WAP home pages, Google has added a system for customizing users' mobile screens independently of their desktop counterparts -- a good move, especially for those 99.9% of us without VGA screens on our phones. Separately, they've also announced a new version of their Java-based Google Maps Mobile app that adds support for live traffic and saving favorite locations. We've tried the new release, and yeah, it's gorgeous -- Moto bundling or not, Yahoo's got some catch-up to play.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

How do you make an annoying service even more unbearable? In the case of Cingular's Answer Tones (better known as ringback tones), you give customers the option of torturing their callers with "personalized" celebrity greetings to go along with the current catalog of low-quality song snippets. The wireless services provider has just a launched a program called "Say My Name" that offers subscribers the dubious ability of having celebrities like Juvenile, Ice T, Jamie Kennedy, and a bunch that we never head of, repeat a $2 canned message -- complete with the owner's first name (if they're lucky enough to have one of the 40 or so names deemed popular enough for this promotion, that is) -- while they're digging around pockets and purses for their phones. Note to our friends: the first time we hear a "Wassup, this ya boy Juve the Great..." when we call one of you, you'll be immediately kicked out of the Circle of Trust.

[Via Mobiledia]