Well, maybe not Napster and maybe not an ideal solution, but this article on the BBC Online website suggests otherwise thanks to a solution to be offered by the French company, Apeera, a solution to provide a peer-to-peer file sharing client for the advanced functionality found in phones that run mobile Operating Systems such as those provided by Symbian, Palm and (to a lesser extent) the bloated and unstable Microsoft smartphone.

The BBC site says "The technology gives users a digital store cupboard for their own media files and lets them pass them on to anyone who wants to use, listen or look at them on their own handset."

The Apeera web site describes itself thus; "The Apeera-Client software resides in the mobile handset and represents the functionality and intelligence to enable the managed peer-to-peer application sharing solution. It enables a synchronized interaction between the Apeera-Server and the handsets and extends transparently the handset’s operating system to the Apeera-Server".

I often find that the BBC Technology web site comes across as a little naive, and here, although it has a photograph of a Nokia 3650 and mentiones that "Some phones use software known as Java that lets them do much more sophisticated things" , such a service as this, being offered by Apeera, would need some drastically cheaper net access for mobile devices, and as smartphones are built with more and more memory capacity anyway (P800, 3650), the storage facility offered by Apeera would be less attractive as a store cupboard.

What I want is flat rate, unmetered GPRS. If I had this, I would be more interested in Apeera's offering.

Nevertheless, one more option for users to consider cannot be a bad thing and the operators are interested; "Mr Bisaz said many operators were interested in Apeera because it allowed customers to get more out of their handset and gave the operator a regular point of contact with subscribers".

Would you want peer-to-peer file sharing on your phone?