Hypothesis: A cell phone will get cold if you put it in the freezer.

Method: Put a cell phone in a freezer, and measure the temperature through bluetooth communication and monitoring software.

Background: I have a super cheap Sony Ericsson K550i with all the usual features: 2.0 megapixel camera, FM radio, and bluetooth. It’s a sweet phone, and was priced cheap to attract buyers who want the features of those Sony Ericsons but don’t want to pay extra for crazy buttons or orange phones. I use My Phone Explorer to manage the contacts and whatnot on the phone, and I love that piece of software. A crazy thing it does is it allows for the monitoring of your phone’s status: battery power, connection strength, and, most importantly for this experiment, temperature. Why would I care about the temperature of the phone? I don’t know. It’s most likely stored within the phone for internal monitoring so that the phone can adjust the battery’s behavior. I’m guessing here; I really don’t know why this is important. But it can be used for… pointless experimentation!

Experiment:

1. Put phone outside in Hong Kong hotness to get the temperature up.

2. Link the phone up to a bluetooth connection and go to the status page in My Phone Explorer

3. Every 30 seconds, record the temperature of the phone on a spreadsheet.

4. Put the phone in the freezer.

5. Quit when you wimp out.

Result: The phone got cold. Now, there may be some out there who would think this foolish. You’re correct, because I ended up wrecking the battery due to condensation issues in the swampy Hong Kong air. I reasoned that this phone has been through a similar environment in Canada, so this shouldn’t be a problem. I forgot about condensation. I have a nice red sticker on my phone’s battery that indicates exposure to moisture and it shuts off after a certain amount of time when powered through the battery. The phone itself works; I had a spare battery that I bought from a guy selling them on a blanket on the streets of Shenzhen for $3.00 US and there are no problems. My phone rudely calls this an ‘alien battery’, though.

Graph: There is a graph. Temperatures are in degrees Celsius.