When Cellphones Become Webservers

An anonymous reader writes "Nokia is experimenting with turning mobile phones into webservers, according to an interesting article on Linux Devices. Nokia has ported the Apache webserver and a few other software modules to the Symbian OS that runs its phones, but there shouldn't be any barrier to adapting the technique to Linux mobile phones, since it all appears to be released under Linux-friendly open source licenses. Just think of the possibilities of having a webserver in your pocket!"

Use it as a local proxy

[castoridae]

From TFA, the web server does have i.e. mod_python, so there should be some programmability there. I could see using the web server as a proxy - maybe for security reasons, but even more for automatic downloading & caching of web pages as the user moves in and out of connectivity.

Something I'd Like To See...

[LEX LETHAL]

To be able to run distributed computing applications like BOINC on your cellphone when it's not in use. It would suspend the activity when the battery charge reaches a user-defined limit.

You could crunch units at night while your phone is charging.

Not much use....

[tsvk]

I don't see much use in this... Ususally (at least in GSM GPRS and UMTS 3G networks) the phones are behind one or two NATs. That is, all packet data users of an mobile operator are seen to the internet as coming from the host gprs.mobile.operator.com, or the like. You cannot directly connect from the internet to a specific mobile phhone's IP address, regardless of the existence of a mobile web server there.

NATting is partly done to protect the mobile users from excess traffic. Imagine someone pingflooding your mobile's IP address, and you paid for data packet traffic by the kilobyte! :)

I see this webserver porting more as an technology demo from Nokia's part: "Hey look how cool our phone operating system and programming platform is!", instead of being a real, useful application.

A mesh network server would mean instant user owne

[Anonymous Coward]

A mesh network server would mean an instant user owner internet that is already deployed!
No matter what lobbists tried to get congress to throttle the internet into tiers!
That mean free internet anywhere that you can daisy chain cellphone links unless the send and recieve frequencites cell phone suse are not the same as cell tower send frequencies.

Perhaps the qualcomm walkie talking phones would work? or FRM family radios with 5 mile range?
been waiting for someone to build hand held laser send and receives witha usb connector for computers running mesh netwroks. That would make some bandwidth fast!

Geopilot
www.globalboiling.com

Actually, I've used a webserver on a phone before

[FooAtWFU]

I've used a webserver on a phone before... it was actually more of a phone/PDA (Seimens SX66). It was for demonstration purposes- we had some stuff there running on the NetFront multimodal browser, and the pages were being served up using an IBM Java-based setup, WCTME (Websphere Client Technology Micro Edition).

I don't believe it was running there on the final product, though. Which is good, since you'd have to invoke the Java service management framework manually and give it some time to start up before using it...

Re:Okay, seriously, someone explain the usefulness

[glasn0st]

Well, what about doing a HTTP POST to send you a free text message instead of an expensive SMS message (provided you have flat rate GPRS or something like that). Or perhaps people at work could upload some files to you that you'll need.

For a geek, it should be no problem to think of some cool applications. But I agree that it won't become mainstream fast. I don't even know if most cellphone operators provide real public IP addresses to cellphones. My operator, T-mobile, seems to, but I've never actually tried listening it on a TCP port and connecting to it from the net.

wherethehellismyphone.com

[Council]

The first thing I would do is have the phone update to a page, wherethehellismyphone.com. I would have this constantly updated with rough GPS coordinates. I'm not sure what phones can tell you their rough GPS coords, though. But it could give you all sorts of useful information in case the phone is lost or stolen -- what it last saw, where it was last used, etc.

I mention this because I recently picked up this laptop [nniling.us], and one of my first plans is to get a GPS card installed in it. I'll have it running something netstumbler-like, and if it's lost or stolen, it will do its best to log in and upload the GPS coords to wherethehellismylaptop.com. So, if my laptop is lost or stolen, and the thief leaves it turned on while passing through any open wifi or going online in any way, presto. I could have the site have a Google Maps thingy that shows me where it was most recently spotted and when.

This doesn't even require the GPS card -- any information you can have the device update you with is useful. It could tell me what the person was last looking at, what pages they're frequenting, etc. Get their name from their MySpace page and have the police show up at their door. Letting mobile devices act as servers opens up a lot of these possibilities, including making them easy to use as James-Bond-type spy/bug gadgets and taking a big step in the direction of useful remote presence.

Of course, wherethehellismylaptop.com would require a very secure login if you want any privacy, ever.

Re:not good enough

[Marty200]

The only usefull application for this would be to have the website tell you it's physical location. I'd love to be able to log in in the morning and have an easy way to find my phone.

MG

Re:What is the purpose?

[glesga_kiss]

Embedded webservers can have uses however. Many routers have web UIs that many readers will be familiar with, but the main difference is that they are not running Apache! There are better (more lightweight) embedded webservers out there.

You could do a couple of useful things to this. It could provide a means to upload files or change configuration settings. A messaging interface could be useful, letting you use the phones inbox on a PC. With things like WiFi and bluetooth, there are possiblities.

And as the parent poster says, running a webserver (etc) on a mobile/pda isn't all that new.

Engineering monitoring applications

[Reverberant]

But an actual web server?

It could be great for engineers like me that deploy a lot of short-term and long-term measurement systems (noise/vibration/temperature/wind speed/etc) and want to make the data available in real-time to interested parties (e.g. a local community).

Currently, the only way to disseminate this info is:

• manually download the info every X days and stick it on a "real" webserver (time consuming, possibly impractical depending on location, weather, etc)
• hook up a laptop with a cellmodem to the unit (expensive, power hungry), and
• hook up a land line (very expensive).

I would love to just be able to hook up a cellphone to the data logging unit, and just point people to www.city-noise-monitoring.org/site1. Yeah I know, niche application.

The only issues I see:

1. can I interface my unit to the phone using serial or bluetooth? and
2. will the cell phone companies have a reasonable data-rate plan?

I for one will be watching out for this.

What's the point?

[sotweed]

As many have pointed out, there are power and bandwidth issues around this idea. Not everything that CAN be done is worth doing. This seems like one that isn't worth doing. There was a tiny (less than 256 bytes of code, as I recall!) web server done at least 5 years ago on something like a PIC controller at U of Mass (?). So this doesn't seem very impressive.

What's the advantage to having a web server where there's uncertain connectivity, limited resources generally, and high communication costs?

More interesting would be a stationary web server and an interesting way of updating information on it from the mobile unit while conserving bandwidth and minimizing the effects of intermittent connectivity. So, perhaps I could clip the phone to my shirt pocket and have it send back to the server a photo every 5 minutes. (Of course, if noone ever visits the web site, a solution like this will use MORE power than the server on the phone, if noone ever connects to it...)

Re:not good enough

[zenslug]

I can think of another useful application extending the location idea: localized web radio

Driving/walking along, decide you are bored of the songs on your phone, turn to local web radio and listen to some else's songs. Something like that obviously wouldn't need to be restricted to a location, but that would make it managable (resource-wise) for the owner of the phone/server, and I think it would add an element of fun, too.

Also, aside from music, you could do even more light-weight journalism. Stream audio and video straight from your phone/camera to the web. I think that is a very powerful idea.