Serving your embedded

Usually people think embedded devices are clients for some services such as voice calls, video streaming, short messages and internet. But how about serving with your embedded device.

For example Nokia has a mobile web server for Symbian. It's modified Apache and is available as open source. They say that main target running a web server in your mobile phone is to make your personal mobile website. So what kind of are these personal mobile websites? Some information about you? It can't be anything that spends resources, it it just showing some simple pages. Isn't there any lighter way to show some information about you? I suppose nobody wants to surf to my mobile phone which might not be alwys available. I also thing that nobody wants to make this kind of page available as primary home pages since it's too easy and cheap to set up the pages to a real server.

But wait a minute, how about a whole, fully working web server serving some pages on the Internet. I found a Nokia 770 and Apache intresting combination. 770 has WLAN so it can be set up with wireless access point and get it visible to the Internet. Apache serving some personal web pages, portal or anything you like. How about setting up a server cluster? Multiple embedded devices serving on same address. Easy and cheap redunancy. Let's take a normal 770, it costs about 370 euros. Cheaper than a computer or a real web server.

How reasonable this is? Embedded devices are not any realiable, so anything can go wrong at any time. They does not automatically recover from error situations. You simply should not trust them. But at least serving web pages with your embedded device is really geeky and increases your masculine power. For power users only.