Nokia /Linux Phones As Webservers

Came across this about Nokia turning mobiles into appservers. Now for the details :

Nokia has ported the Apache webserver to Symbian, in order to enable mobile phones to serve content on the World Wide Web. Many mobile phones today have more processing power than early Internet servers, suggesting that "there really is no reason anymore why webservers could not reside on mobile phones," according to the company. The technique could also be used on Linux mobile phones. Nokia says it was able to develop a gateway application, released under the open source Apache2 license, said to be capable of providing a webserver on a mobile phone with a URL accessible from any Internet browser.

Nokia claims that in a sense, the mobile phone has now finally become a full member of the Internet. This is pretty interesting and opens up new possibilities and challenges as well – first the challenge part : This is a new scenario where like we run windows services on our notebooks, for the first time we are envisaging a scenario of running services on mobiles. It’s a pretty scary thought to look at running services on pervasive devices that keep changing positions and are susceptible to a range of connectivity strength – high strength to blank outs. Normally clients including pervasive devices like mobiles are used as data entry/collecting ports –one that could collect, store, aggregate and send to backend for processing and be the gateway for such bi-directional data flows. The interesting thing here is this may be possible in controlled environments, say inside institutions, government complex, shopping malls, central business districts, factories where signal strength may be uniformly available; we may see new variety of mobile applications becoming a possibility – interesting indeed. May be new QOS based mobile connections may begin to get offered in select places to run these applications. The mobile world is indeed looking for a killer app – may be this could help in making it become a possibility faster.