Nokia Working to put Web Servers on Mobile Phones

[Mike Temporale]

http://research.nokia.com/research/projects/mobile-web-server/index.html

"For quite some time it has been possible to access the Internet using mobile phones, although the role of the phone has strictly been that of a client. Considering that modern phones have processing power and memory on par with and even exceeding that of servers of the early web, there really is no reason anymore why webservers could not reside on mobile phones and why people could not create and maintain their own personal mobile websites."

I'm sorry, but this is just the silliest thing I've seen in a while. What happens when your data connection drops, or when your site starts to gain some popularity and you're phone can't handle the requests or the bandwidth? While I think it would be a neat idea, I don't think this is something that is worth doing. You're better off building an interface to control and update your website that is hosted someplace else. But that's just my $0.02, what do I know. :roll:

[Mike Temporale]

http://research.nokia.com/research/projects/mobile-web-server/index.html

"For quite some time it has been possible to access the Internet using mobile phones, although the role of the phone has strictly been that of a client. Considering that modern phones have processing power and memory on par with and even exceeding that of servers of the early web, there really is no reason anymore why webservers could not reside on mobile phones and why people could not create and maintain their own personal mobile websites."

I'm sorry, but this is just the silliest thing I've seen in a while. What happens when your data connection drops, or when your site starts to gain some popularity and you're phone can't handle the requests or the bandwidth? While I think it would be a neat idea, I don't think this is something that is worth doing. You're better off building an interface to control and update your website that is hosted someplace else. But that's just my $0.02, what do I know. :roll:

[edgar]

I agree that you probably wouldn't use it for a information providing website such as this one or even pictures etc. Anythign requiring high availability or high bandwidth.

But a webserver doesn't have to be providing HTML text pages or pictures or anything like that.

A personal website can also be a web front end to other applications, other data etc. For example, no reason why it can't be a remote access front end - remotely control and view your phone screen or camera? Get to your phone data via an http or https call? Get to documents, lists, etc via the same?

That I can see happening - not an always on, always accessible html text page - albeit the processors, memory and bandwidth are approaching that capability. But a front end process that allows something besides direct API's - using industry standard access methods could really provide a great deal of innovation, not to mention a greater ease of porting information and exisiting web based apps.

[Stinger]

Has anyone got a Nokia smartphone and tried this? It sounds like fun.

[Mike Temporale]

Originally Posted by Stinger

Has anyone got a Nokia smartphone and tried this? It sounds like fun.

It's from their R&D department, so I don't think it's something you can do - just yet.