After a decade or more of handling plain old phone calls and the occasional text message or video image, wireless phones are starting to become nearly as powerful as a desktop computer. At the DEMO conference in Palm Desert, Calif., that newfound power has companies exhibiting a new generation of applications to make cell phones do cool things.

For Jonathan Medved, the inspiration struck while he was on hold for an unusually long time with Hertz trying to rent a car. “I was looking at my phone and thought, ‘Why is the screen dark?’ I wondered why Hertz couldn’t show me pictures of the cars I might rent from them,” he says.

His company, Israel-based Vringo, goes at least part of the way toward providing an answer to that question. Vringo lets consumers create short video clips that act like the ringtones already popular on cell phones, or what the company calls “Vringos.” Send one clip to a friend and every time you call him or her, they’ll see that video clip play on their phone’s display screen, and they can reply in kind.

Typically, wireless carriers are loath to let anything happen on the phone that might distract from a call. “There’s a wall between the computer side of the phone and the phone side, and usually you’re not allowed to break through that wall,” says Vringo Vice-President Benjamin Levy. “We had to find a little crack in that wall and force it open.”

And that’s Vringo’s secret, which is central to some 21 patents on how the Vringo technology works. So far, it works on certain high-end phones running Symbian Series 60, the smart-phone operating system put out by Symbian, which is majority-owned by Nokia, and phones running Microsoft’s Windows Mobile. The company is looking to do deals with…

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