When you Open Sign mShell 2.02 you get some capabilities that are not available with the self signed (standard) version. In this post I'll show you how to do this.

1. If you have an previous version installed on you phone. Uninstall it first.
   
2. Download mShell 2.02 or higher from here.
3. Go to the Open Signed web site: https://www.symbiansigned.com/app/page/public/openSignedOnline.do
4. On that site enter the IMEI of your phone. For the IMEI type on your phone: *#06#
5. Enter a valid email.
6. Select the mShell SIS file that you want to sign: mShell-S60-3rd-OS.sis for Nokia and mShell-UIQ3-OS.sis for UIQ phones.
7. Select all capabilities.
8. Enter the verification code and accept the agreement.
9. Now you will recieve a confirmation email, click the link and soon after that you'll recieve a second email with a download link. Download it.
10. Install the signed mShell SIS file on your phone.
11. (Optional) Register your copy of mShell.
    

I've just been playing with the mobile web server of Nokia Research. What they did was just simply porting the Apache web server to the Symbian platform. One problem they had to work around was that the IP of the phone is not accessible from the outside since it is behind a firewall of the provider. To work around that they just implemented a gateway that redirects the requests to the phone. Its quite simple: You install the application on the phone and start it up then you register on the website and pick a subdomain (http://mshell.mymobilesite.net for example). Then you enter your account details on the phone, it connects then to the gateway and is ready for the requests. You can also browse your mobile site locally by using the browser on your phone. What kinda sucks is that if you don't have a flatrate for your data transfers its almost unusable unless you want to ruin yourself, you can only browse it locally.

The whole project is open source and you can create dynamic pages just like in PHP or ASP using Python. Would be nice to create mobile web applications using m, eh?

Huge Kudos to the research team of Nokia.

MyMobileSite.com

Project Site on Forum Nokia 

I've been diving into the Symbian platform lately. I already worked with it in some minor MIDP (Java) projects but the last few weeks have been filled with reading trough the documentation and checking out the example programs. Its interesting to see how Symbian has tweaked the C++ language quite a bit with strict naming conventions that are necessary for the compiler so that he knows what he ought to do. There is it's own kind of exception handling, etc. When you have finally compiled a program then you need to go trough a expensive and lengthy signing process in order to make the file distributable. 

All this makes mShell so cool because it gives anyone from kickass programmer to the beginner access to many Symbian features, leaving out the whole complicated developing process. We see people using it as a prototyping tool or implementing one of the many little programs that just gives you the feature your handheld computer is missing. But we also used mShell for quite sophisticated projects like distributed BT dispensers, where people could come up to a terminal, turn BT on and receive free content or other programmers that have taken it quite far like a full blown ICQ client or an FTP program.