Can I download Wikipedia to my Sony Ericsson K750i?

May 17, 2006 3:54 AM

Can I download Wikipedia to my Sony Ericsson K750i, or do I need a fancy smartphone?

The K750i is "java-enabled", which I think means it runs bog standard java apps, but has no operating system to speak of. I know wikipedia spans many gigabytes these days, but I'd be happy with an old or compacted version (ditching images, tables, and HTML is fine). I only have a 64Mb Memory Stick in the phone at the moment, but I'd be willing to splash out on a much larger one if this is actually possible.

I've found a couple of editions formatted for eBook readers, but these are all designed to run on PDAs and OS-equipped phones. I've also found Tequilacat which is a general text-reader for java-enabled phones. I've no idea how I would go about converting the wikipedia database into a format it can read though. This perl module looks helpful, but I'd like to know if this is a solved problem before I get my hands dirty learning perl.

posted by hoverboards don't work on water to technology (9 comments total)

While I'm not answering your main question, I can inform you that is is indeed possible to buy larger memory sticks for your phone. The k750i uses 'Memory Stick Pro Duo', which I've seen up to 2GB in-store and Sony have recently announcned 4GB models on the way.

Also, if you are only copying the most recent revisions of articles (rather than all the respective histories, too), the database is under 1GB. (At least, it was when I last checked)

I hope that helps and I hope that someone else more knowledgeable than myself can answer your other questions.
posted by PuGZ at 4:02 AM on May 17, 2006

Just set your phone to point to:

http://en.wapedia.org/

and you can access the site through WAP.
posted by DZ-015 at 4:03 AM on May 17, 2006

http://en.wapedia.org through OperaMini would be the ideal.

I had a Java dictionary app that was way smaller than Wikipedia is and found it to be intolerably slow. Going online just to get whatever you happen to need would be much faster.
posted by birdherder at 4:25 AM on May 17, 2006

PuGZ: I'm aware that larger cards are available; the "if this is actually possible" referred to the possibility of putting wikipedia on one of these larger cards :)

DZ-015: My phone supports WAP but I'm not sure my wallet does. Data plans are extortionate in the UK.

birdherder: the K750i comes with Super Real Tennis, a game with 25fps 3D texture-mapped Playstation 1 level graphics. I refuse to believe it can't search through a flat text file!
posted by hoverboards don't work on water at 4:39 AM on May 17, 2006

Can you set a K750i to use GPRS? I'd guess you can, since my K500i is supposed to be able to. Orange will sell you something like 4Mb of data transfer for £4 a month. Still quite expensive, but I'd guess it would be enough bandwidth for regular use of wapedia.
posted by matthewr at 5:21 AM on May 17, 2006

Maybe take a look at Encyclopodia and wiki2ebook? There might be something in there you can use.
posted by teleskiving at 5:37 AM on May 17, 2006

hoverboards... I have the K750i and while the Sega tennis is good [compared to snake on my old Nokias], it isn't using parsing a 1GB text file.

After posting I was thinking your question was posed to avoid the high cost of data transfer which isn't an issue on my service [all you can transfer for $4.00/mth].
posted by birdherder at 6:05 AM on May 17, 2006

I'm in the UK, and use Wapedia all the time on my Nokia 6630 (mostly to settle arguments, often in the pub). I'm on prepay with O2, and haven't really noticed the cost of browsing - I'd be surprised if you found it expensive.

I second what birdherder said about the size of the file, too - I wrote a bookreader app for ebooks from Project Gutenberg, and had to jump through a few hoops to avoid bumping into memory issues. (Admittedly it's written in Python, but the books are only a few hundred kb.)

Wapedia's brilliant.
posted by wilberforce at 6:58 AM on May 17, 2006

Wikipedia's content expands to ~90GB uncompressed, IIRC.
posted by arimathea at 7:49 AM on May 17, 2006