I personally have a Photon 4G as my phone. It has 1 GB RAM and a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 CPU at 1GHz. More powerful phones have come onto the market since I got this phone last fall. I personally think that volunteer computing needs to go where the CPU-cycles are and enable research to run there. Having said that, there is a lot of work to be done to get to the point of running on phones. However, BOINC has started working towards building the client to run on Android and as they evolve that effort the burden will then shift to projects needing to provide research applications that can run on the platform. For WCG, right now our focus is on GPU as a platform. However, I can see us working toward being on the mobile platform at some point in the future.

Hello mikey159b and Coleslaw,
This is great. I am thinking of saran wrap over a baking sheet with water and ice under the wrap to lay the phone on.

Keep us informed.

Lawrence

After running it for about 2 hours it was running a bit warm, but not any worse then talking on it for a bit. I shut it down for a while because I was gonna need it in areas that fight for signal and therefore run the battery low, but I didn't see it consuming that bad of a draw on the phone over all. I think Angry Birds drains it worse. About 2 1/2 hours run time got about 15% complete on each task. I will let it run all night though to see what happens.

I will note that there are settings in the app that will let you set it to shut the app down if the battery hits 10% or if the battery gets over 100C. Looks like a lot of thought went into the app.

Edit: I will also note that PrimeGrid also allows you to run one of their apps (Cullen/Woodall Sieve I believe) and also Enigma seems to respond. ( I have not yet downloaded work from either one, so will update later)

Edit2: I was also able to easily receive and send texts as well as make phone calls or pretty much anything else I tried. I didn't however try playing games while it was running.

Phones putting in work, , good job. I am personally more excited about the possibility of BOINC building up their software for ARM. Or the projects, whichever really.

Good job Coleslaw, will keep checking this thread for more updates

Never say never.
The first computer used vacuum tubes and occupied an entire room.
Can it run BOINC? No.
But it lead to the modern PC which can.

The original question is valid.
However, the question should be not if it can be done but when it will be done.
The line between personal computers and hand held devices is blurry but as technology evolves they will become completely indistinguishable.
Certainly there are many things to consider regarding crunching on handheld devices.
But that is what engineers do.