Task force/Offline/Cellphone

Targeting cellphones for WP 1.0

Given the penetration of cellphones in the developing world, the Offline Talkforce considers the cellphone platform to be a priority. It was agreed that whatever format the WP 1.0 release is in, it should be convertible to an HTML dump.

There is already a supplier for wikipedia on cellphones - http://www.wikipock.com/ . The Wikipock collection is 7 GB, which includes all the English WP, as well as ES and PT But no pictures or infoboxes.

Issues

1. storage capacity
   • Modern phones in 2009 have micro-SD slots - that (to date) have capacities up to 32 Gig
   • We are targeting phones in 2011 or so
   • The phone itself has more limited storage - sizes of 16Meg to 64Meg would be useful to target
   • Content might be selective - full articles, lede only, pictures or not, references or not
2. presentation
   1. A reader
      • allows custom storage format, search
      • must be built for each platform - Symbian, Windows Mobile, Android
      • User:Kelson warned that the ZIM file might need to be device-specific
      • User:Aude explores SMS and voice gateways on Talk
   2. cellphones built-in browser
      • All targeted phones will have one
      • May require inefficient storage like uncompressed HTML
      • Mozilla Fennec, a mobile-browser project, and embedding APIs may provide a future browser-based reader functionality.

Third world preloading of cellphones

A long discussion by User:Dafer45 on the Talk: page of this article can be summarised as :-

• Create an application suitable for mobile phones that can hold a large amount of articles
• Compile a list of important an well written material for each country/region/language
• Convince mobile phone developers to depending on which country/region/language it distributes its phone to, to preload these phones with a localized version of the application with the material from the corresponding list.

Use of online mobile access

• Possible to be a telcom service?