For the Sony Ericsson P800/P900 smartphone series it is possible to test networked mobile applications and services by having them reside on the local PC instead of going over GPRS/GSM for accessing such a server on the Internet. This setup works, provided that the service or content of interest can really be served from your local PC. This can save you some time and costs during development of the mobile client application where typically numerous edit/compile/test(=network access) iterations need to be carried out before the applications behaves exactly as intended.

The PC Suite connectivity solution that ships with the P800/P900 products is based on a so called 'mRouter' technology, that is licensed from Intuwave Ltd. This solution creates TCP/IP connectivity  between the connected device and the PC. This means that in case the service is running directly on the local PC the mobile application on the P800/P900 can directly access that service over the PC connectivity link.

HTTP server setup
In this article, we will not go into how to download/install and configure a HTTP server on your PC, this is described elsewhere on the Internet. But if you plan to access an HTTP server that serves JAD/JAR and/or SIS files for download/install of the application, it may be neccessary to configure the HTTP server so that it supports the MIME types for  these application file types.

Here is an example for configuring the Apache HTTP server:

Open the file .\conf\mime.types in the Apache root folder.

Make sure the following three entries exists somewhere in that file:

     text/vnd.sun.j2me.app-descriptor     jad
     application/java-archive                     jar
     application/vnd.symbian.install         sis

This will assure that the server is able to understand what file types these are. It also assures that the Symbian "Internet" application (browser) in the P800/P900 phone recognises the downloaded files for what they represent.

Phone setup
Any TCP/IP based service on your local PC can be accessed from an application (MIDlet, PersonalJava application, C++ application) running on the P800/P900 phone by using the following host address from the application: