[FormerPalmOS]

Here's what affects this:

1) Your phone won't start anything related to ringing until a tower poll tells it that it is being called. You don't want to change the slot cycle index (poll frequency) - this will whack your battery life, especially if your signal is weak.

2) The "ring" process in your phone can incur a number of delays. The HTC phone canvas is good for about a solid second of sound delay (light flashing, but no ring or vibrate). The stock WM dialer has no such delay (but also won't recognize ##xxx programming / service dials).

3) The ring tone type and save location and size can also affect this (previous post). Fastest is a .WAV file stored on the phone's main memory and NOT cooked into the ROM (has to be decompressed first if cooked in). Slowest is an MP3 or WMA stored on the storage card. Smaller files load faster than big ones, but you knew that. Convert your ring tone or MP3 to 8-bit unsigned mono, 22 KHz and it should give you a small file size.

4) Other stuff running in the background or a slow (stock) ROM will of course contribute delays.