Martin Sauter posted an interesting piece on his blog this past week talking about the possiblity of S60 devices becoming Web servers themselves. Apparently Nokia R&D have managed to port Apache and Python to an S60 device, making it capable of serving Web services (not the first time a mobile Web server app has been engineered, but certainly a compelling new evolution). Throwing in WiFi to put the mobile device on a personal network would enable many new and intriguing uses for a small mobile Web server. Martin lists examples of possible usage scenarios such as:

• While you are at home, the mobile phone is part of your network via Wifi. Instead of using the small phone keyboard for many things like writing text messages or to change settings, you can use a web browser which communicates with the personal web server on the mobile phone.
• Today I use Yahoo! Go for synchronizing my calendar and address book with the web. This way, I can edit my contacts and my calendar via a web browser while at home or at work and synchronize back and forth between the desktop and the mobile phone. With a personal web server in the phone, no synchronization is necessary anymore. Everything is always in the phone. Of course there should be a function in the phone that automatically sends a backup of all data to a server while I am at home.
• If you are away from home and in the office, you can still use the web browser instead of the mobile phone as the web server can also be accessed via the cellular network.

Location-based services take on a new dimension when they are being "served" by a mobile device.