I didn’t say that dynamic content wasn’t possible. I said porting all of the other customary infrastructure wasn’t likely to happen … good luck!

Cheers.
Scott

Haha, I agree that there won’t be much use of it. But here I am, experimenting with it because it’s part of my school project. And I’m quite stuck with it. Why did you mention, Mr Burkett, that dynamic content won’t be possible? That sure spells trouble for me, because I was supposed to host a guestbook. And that was the easy part.

The harder part, I thought, is I’m supposed to have a part of the website that reports my location (probably through a gsm tracker software). Sure sounds like dynamic content to me..

I tried playing with the apache settings, trying to allow cgi scripts, but with no luck..

Best Regards,
Ronald

R&D is one of those areas that you never know what you’ll get from it – some of the craziest ideas turn into the greatest innovations (.e.g Bell Labs and UNIX, DARPA and the Internet, Motorola and the cell phone.) Of course, history is rife with those “other” ideas that didn’t quite pan out as well. So perhaps they just rolled the dice.

I would venture to say that the Nokia/Apache port didn’t come from customer suggestions. I doubt they had a wave of customers calling them up proclaiming their desire to have a library of Apache 2.x modules available to them on their phones. “Hey guys, I was wondering when mod_rewrite will be available for my 6160?”

IMHO, R&D should ideally lead to increased revenues or product adoption. I don’t see this as doing either. This will not leapfrog them over their competitors. Instead, I would have focused on making a better battery, better reception, more/better PDA functionality, etc. Things that customers really want.

Cheers.
Scott

Second, I’m sure that Nokia – as always – has made some investigations before starting this project – to see if anybody is *interested* in such a component. I presume they wouldn’t have started it at all if no ROI had been foreseen.

Third, might be important only for techies: hey, I haven’t heard anything about mobile web servers used by many people. Does anyone know at all if it’s a good thing or bad? Let’s make it ourselves (thought Nokia, I guess) and we’ll see if it was worth the time (and money). I must admit, though, that from ROI’s point of view it might not have been the wisest decision. :-\

Tote

I think you hit on a key point. The “utility value” is more of a novelty. As I pointed out above, there is no doubt that it is “cool” – the question is whether or not it solves a business need.

I say “business need” because I am assuming Nokia spent some significant dollars in porting Apache to their devices. If I’m paying a team of engineers, I want some ROI beyond a “cool factor.”
Cheers.
Scott

I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear enough: I just meant that if you had a web server on your mobile phone it would be very easy to tell your friends that “Hey, just check out my latest pictures taken here and there!”. And they could simply download the images, videos, etc. directly from your phone without having to upload them on to a dedicated server that everybody can access. I’m not sure, though, if this feature is worth the trouble it may cause otherwise.

Cheers,

Tote

Having enabled a web server, you can basically forget about having to upload your images, videos, etc. to anywhere. I’m not saying that I’m a fan of this idea and I agree with you about all cons you’ve listed, but … it still makes sense to provide this service on a mobile phone.

-Andrew