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The clever guys at the Nokia Research Center have been working on porting Apache, the the most widely used webserver to run on a S60 Symbian mobile device. 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.

The goal of the project seems to a proof of concept rather than for any real purpose ,but due to the GNU licence the fruits of the labor have been made available free of charge.

In their own words:
"Being able to run Apache on a mobile phone is rather interesting in itself but still not much more than a quirk unless it can be accessed from a browser outside the device itself. Our target was to make it possible to access a webserver running on a mobile phone, equipped with a standard operator SIM, from any browser on the Internet, at any time.

Initially we utilized a Bluetooth PAN network but although that already is useful – it provides for the possibility of accessing functionality on the phone using a big screen and proper keyboard – it is quite limited compared with what access over the cellular network would imply.

Providing access to a mobile phone from the Internet is not straightforward, as operators typically employ firewalls that prevent access from the Internet to phones inside that firewall. By implementing a custom gateway we could circumvent that limitation and we are now able to provide a webserver on a mobile phone with a global URL than can be accessed from any browser. In a sense, the mobile phone has now finally become a full member of the Internet."

Once installed you need to contact Nokia to request for your phone to be connect to their bridging server, this grants people access to your device, and away you go… The software has been developed and tested around the Nokia 6330 and will work on any S60 2nd Edition Feature Pack 2 based device and probably will work on any FP3 based device. It will not work on a vanilla 2Ed or on a FP1 based device.

If you are interested and you have a Nokia you can check what S60 version your phone is based on by going here: I really like the idea of this, I have been hosting my own website for a few years now, but the thought of having my website in my pocket and available to all is way cool……. I suddenly have the urge to buy an old 6330 .

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Chris Leckness is the Owner/Administrator of Mobilitysite. He is a Microsoft MVP, Mobile Devices and a member of the exclusive focus group, Mobius. Chris runs a Mobilitysite, GotZune, and a few other smaller sites and blogs. His personal blog is chris.leckness.com.