gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials » iphone tips

Send Free SMS with iPhone and iPod Touch

Martin Brinkmann — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 22:56:54 +0000

Phone Providers are making lots of cash from SMS, the Short Messaging Service. It’s interesting in my opinion that they charge that much for such a small data transfer. A new trend that they probably do not like that much is the addition of new technologies that create free or low cost connections to the Internet because those connections can be used to send text messages for free.

It’s just a matter of finding the right service that is compatible to the mobile phone. In the case of the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch the My Digital Life website posted a nice trick. Users can grab the AIM client for their clients and install it on the device. Then it’s merely a question of adding phone numbers as clients in iChat or any other instant messaging client on the phone. To be precise the account name will be the complete phone number of the contact including country and area codes. A valid phone number would be +123456789 for example. The + sign has to stand at the beginning.

Now start the AIM client software and send the new contact a message. He will receive it as an SMS. His reply on the other hand will land directly in the AIM client software.

The benefit of this method is obviously that it is completely free if the Internet connection is free. Do you know other ways to send free SMS with the iPhone, iPod Touch or other mobile devices ?

Transfer Files between iPhone, iPod and Computer

Martin Brinkmann — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 21:04:44 +0000

It is only natural that some users use their Apple iPhone or iPod Touch as a portable device that stores files. The disk space of the Apple devices are definitely large enough to provide room for some additional files. Not necessarily pictures, music or other multimedia files but maybe documents or executable files that are essential to the user.

Disk Aid can transfer files between a computer running Windows or Mac OSX and an iPhone or iPod Touch. My older iPod Nano was not recognized by the software which means that it is most likely only working with the two devices mentioned above. A supported device is recognized automatically by the application. It reminds the user to install iTunes if that software is not installed on the local computer.

The application supported the usual file operations like copying files from and to the iPhone or iPod Touch, creating folders, deleting files, renaming and even copying folders with their contents.

No jailbreak is needed to use Disk Aid and the supported firmwares are 1.1.1 to 1.1.4. Great software if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch.

Texterity Magazines offering free iPhone magazines

Martin Brinkmann — Tue, 27 May 2008 07:46:57 +0000

Just a few minutes ago I completed the article that explained how to read 20 digital magazines for free by changing the browser’s User Agent to the one of the Apple iPhone. I decided to look for additional free iPhone offers and discovered that Texterity Magazines are also providing 50 magazines to iPhone users free of charge.

Again the User Agent is used as the only mechanism to check if an iPhone connects to the service. If you have already installed the Firefox User Agent switcher add-on and added the iPhone user agent to it you are ready to visit the iPhone start page at Texterity Magazines to read any of the 50 magazines for free in your browser.

If you have not done this visit my first article that explains how you can change the User Agent in Firefox to be identified as an iPhone (Iphone user agent) when browsing the Internet.

Magazines seem to be specialized way more at Texterity. Some titles are The American Lawyer, Electronic Products, Extreme How-To, Greenlight Magazine and Popular Science.