Mobile internet

With the big mobile phone companies shoving more handsets out than before and now that some companies actually seem to have rather decent web browsers already deployed on phones (the screen size is still something of a problem, though), the whole mobile internet/web discussion is starting to become relevant and interesting. Although typically this is understood in the .mobi sense of the term and the related things like providing sites for mobile devices. At least that's how I percieved it anyway; the handset is just another device which offers a viewpoint to the web, like your own computer.

But some time back some nice blokes at NRC published a port of the Apache web server to the S60 (Symbian) platform and the implications are somewhat interesting, to say the least. More on the project is available at the NRC Mobile Web Server pages. Sufficient to say, with the whole Web 2.0 boom with mashups and whatnots, one could rather easily provide an open and documented interface to a mobile phone through a web server talking some standardized XML dialect. Presence, etc.

I guess I'll take this up as a personal project for this spring; setting up the S60 port of Apache on my phone and trying to build some nifty app on top of that.