Copying BIG files to the mobile phone

p3600i Jul 1, 2008

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.