Someone mentioned running a web server on a ultra mobile PC the other day. This morning I mentioned the same to Kevin Tofel of JKOnTheRun and then this afternoon, Linuxdevices.com ran a story about mobile phones becoming web servers.
Running a server on a portable device (be it a smartphone, a ultra mobile PC or whatever) seems a bit strange to me becuase I can’t think of many apps where you would need to run a server component. The problem is, you really don’t want to be running services on consumer devices that are moving and exposed to constantly changing environment and connectivity levels. You would normally use the data collector as the client so that it could collect and store all data and then send bulk updates in regular intervals to a more reliable store, not the other way round. The only application I can think of is robotics or some other live remote control. The war scenario comes to mind but then you wouldn’t be relying on a 2G Nokia to take out Sadam would you?.
Now if you were to take ultra mobile PC technology (which itself is derived from existing low-power embedded PC technology) and use it in a fixed server environment, then I can see advantages. The eo, easybook and Q1 run at around 10watts with wifi on and screen off. If you were to take all the webservers in the world and replace them with UMPC’s (you can run clusters for the big server requirements) can you imagine how much energy would be saved? Then you replace the desktops and home PC’s (offering two UMPCs for each home PC to stop people moaning about their precious unused clockrates) and you’re talking hundreds and hundreds of millions of watts of power.
…or I guess, we could all turn a light bulb off. It might be a bit simpler come to think of it!
But going back to servers on mobile devices, its just sounds like a fun research project with no real application. Am I wrong?
Steve / Chippy.
