Copying BIG files to the mobile phone
Bit frustrating to find that Windows seems to have a limit on how big a file can be, if you are transferring it to your phone the official way (by ActiveSynch). But a step back first.
Pocket Wikipedia is now available for Windows Mobile phones, like my HTC p3600i. It’s a subset of the main Wikipedia that as they say only (ha ha) is “about the size of a fifteen volume encyclopaedia (24,000 images and 14 million words)”
But the problem is that the Wikipedia content itself is in one big file. Now large is a relative term. But 192 MB is large for mobile phone transfers.
And Microsoft’s ActiveSynch kept apparently re-starting after a few minutes. I tried some other file manager software but it wouldn’t work. Then I had a brain wave: FTP (File Transfer Protocol). An ‘old’ but reliable way to move files about networks.
Within a few minutes I had:
- Installed an FTP server on the PC with the big file on it
- Installed an FTP client on the mobile phone
- Configured the phone to use my home wireless network
- Connected away
Right now, as I type, it’s transferring happily. It even has a resume function, which was needed when the phone went into sleep mode after 2 minutes. Oops. Fixed that by temporarily telling it to not sleep.