Why having a web server on the n95 is a lot of fun

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Yestereday night when I should have been sleeping I downloaded a web server for the Nokia N95 8GB and so far it’s been a lot of fun (albeit a little slow). It has blogging, messaging, photo galleries and more and here’s a little run down of what the interesting features are.

if you’re logged in then you see a number of features:

Blogging:
This feature allows you to write blog posts and post them. Commenting is possible.

Camera:
There are two options, the first one allows you to take pictures remotely. I can take pictures from my laptop when I want to.

The second is photo requesting. this feature allows for those visiting your website to ask for a picture of something, for example “I want a picture of the restaurant”. Take the phone, take a picture of the restaurant and send it to the person that may be coming soon.

The Gallery:
The gallery has three options. The first of these options is that you select which pictures you want to share. The second option is to share all phone memory pictures whilst the third is to share all memory card pictures.

Guestbook
I haven’t played with this feature yet but it’s pretty self explanatory.

Contact me.
There are two ways by which for someone to contact you from the mobile site. the first is by short IM and the second is by SMS. Both of these work quite well even with slow connection speeds.

Presence
The presence Availability information consists of “Active profile – Silent”, in other words that the phone is silent. That would mean there’s little chance I’ll hear the phone if you call. “Calendar availability – Available lets you know that I’m available. “Call state – Call inactive” means that you can call me since I am not currently using the phone.

Webchat
allows those on the site to chat with the web server user.

Calendar
The calendar is a quick way to see what events are planned and for when

Messaging:
It’s a nice way of seeing the messages people have sent you and when, in other words you can see all the sms you’ve received on your phone remotely. It’s not something you’d share with the world. Unread messages appear in bold.

Phone Log.
Allows you to see all phone traffic on your phone with the usual three distinctions

Contacts, allows you to see all your contacts.

Conclusion

With more ubiquitous wifi and more forgiving data plans we can expect more and more people to carry the webserver with them. If I take pictures of an event you can connect to my phone and look at the pictures I’ve taken. It’s also an easy way of sharing those embarrasing photos with friends. There’s no video support yet but that’s sure to come and there are other options ready already.

Editing from the phone is fast so blogging from the phone makes more sense than via a laptop, in relation that part of your site. There is also an RSS feed which means that those following you can automatically download any content you generate for viewing when your phone is out of range of free wifi or you select not to use the data plan.

The downside is that it uses battery and the connection drops fairly frequently. Data plans that are only a few megabytes large would soon end up costing you more than it’s worth. The connection speeds are slow so doing anything is laborious.

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