Free magazines for iPhone users (and fakers)

If you have an iPhone, or the handy User Agent Switcher for Firefox, there are a couple of sites that offer free digital versions of several popular magazines. I guess the idea is to try and capture email addresses, but you can cancel through the input boxes and get straight to the content fairly easily.

If you are using Firefox, you can fake your browser into reporting itself to web servers as an iPhone by downloading User Agent Switcher and adding an “iPhone” entry with the following user agent string under Tools->User Agent Switcher->Options:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A102 Safari/419 (United States)

Once you’ve switched to that user agent profile, most sites will think you are browsing from the iPhone platform and display the content that is targeted to that device – in this case, free magazines. The two sites that provide magazine content targeted to the iPhone are:

• http://imgs.zinio.com/iphone/
• http://iphone.texterity.com/magazines/

I should mention that there are a couple of racier magazines to be found in there, so I’ll stamp this one with a potential NSFW factor. I’m sure you were going to just scroll right past and check out the Reader’s Digest anyway, so it’s probably not worth mentioning.

[via LifeHacker and Geek.Phatus.com]