Use Your Phone As A Web Server.


The new hype in mobile phones is no longer web surfing but web hosting! According to Nokia.

'We are now able to provide a Web server on a mobile phone with a global URL than can be accessed from any browser,' they explain. 'In a sense, the mobile phone has now finally become a full member of the Internet.'
Johan Wikman and Ferenc Dosa realized that this was possible when they noticed that the processing power on most mobile phones is greater than or equivalent to the first web servers. Creating a means in which people could literally create and maintain their own personal mobile websites.

Warning. Geek talk bellow... skip to "Hmmmm" if you dont want to read it.
They did this by exploiting a Posix layer on the Phone's Symbian OS which actually provides a fair use of Unix functionality. This enabled them to install a modified version of Apache httpd onto a Nokia s60 phone. At first they could only access it via a Bluetooth Personal Area Network (PAN) but once they implemented a custom gateway in the firewalls that mobile operators deploy to prevent access to phones on their network, they where able to make the phones server visible to the Internet and successfully handshake.

Hmmmm. And why would you want to use your phone as a server?

As long as a website resides on a stationary server the physical location of that server lacks meaning, because it will never change,' Wikman and Dosa write. 'With a mobile website it does change and it is meaningful as the content that is shared may depend upon the current location and context. For instance, if you browse to a mobile website and ask the "administrator" to take a picture, the image you get depends upon the location of the website.'
Is that all they could think of? With all the talk about location based services spreading around the mobilists blogosphere you would think that Nokia could come up with a greater use for a mobile server than just location based picture taking.

Can you?

[via PC Pro]

This post is dedicated to the nice woman I helped today on the train. I hope your credit card situation and other stuff works out! :-)

Technorati Tags: bluetooth, httpd, mobile, nokia, personal area network, posix, server, symbian, wireless

Posted by Justin at 02:21 PM | Posted to Camera Phones | Cell Phones | Location Based Services | Mobile Video
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