-= April 1985 =-

Have you ever tried downloading things from Internet using mobile phone? I guess you probably have experienced fetching some pictures and text, or something bigger like short movies or musics.

On Friday morning, when I was listening to ERC conference which was held by Sun at Shangri-La in Chengdu, I felt a little boring when a professor talking about eduction in Russian because I didn't quite catch him. Russian English and Indian English is a little hard to understand.

I have nothing to do, so I take out my phone to play. I searched WiFi singal and found hotspot of Shangri-La. April 23th was my birthday and also the release of Ubuntu 9.04. I found the download link and started to download using UCWEB which can do multi-threaded downloading. The download speed grew up to  and keep stable at almost 200kb/s. At this speed, one times faster than I had in my dormitory, I could get Ubuntu cdimage in only one hour.

How much enegery it cost? I opened the Nokia Engery Profiler and it showed me the real-time current and power consumption of the phone. In average, the phone ate up about 400mA or equally 1.3Watt. So my battery could keep up at least 3 hours downloading. That is to say, I could download 2GB of data from the air before my battery run out. But I'm a little afriad of the battery, it was getting a little warmer.

Downloading by a phone is quite "green". Compare to a normal computer, it uses 0.1KWh every hour and my phone only uses 1% of the energy. So it could be the most energy-saving downloading method I ever seen. I'm wondering if there is some Bittorrent or Emule software I can use on the phone, so I could do my best to saving the earth! Besides, without a WiFi, I could do nothing.