Digital magazine provider Zinio has freed the current issues of 20 popular US magazines (including PC Magazine, Playboy, ...) to test their iPhone-enabled (http://www.zinio.com/iphone) web site.

Interestingly, the word is already all over the Internet, non-iPhone/iPod touch browsers can also score free access by simply changing the user-agent of their browser. With Firefox, you can use the User Agent Switcher (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59) to do this. A correct user-agent string for the iPhone is:

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)

First make sure you wrestle with your conscience before applying this little fix. Sure some people may find using it morally inacceptable; but at the end, everyone knows that user-agents can be faked and that it should never ever be used as a means to protect content. And as I said, the cat is out of the bag, and Zinio doesn't seem to care.

Lifehacker has some more details (http://lifehacker.com/393296/read-full-magazines-for-free-with-or-without-an-iphone).

Works great thanks for the heads up. Going to see if i can get it running on my treo running Opera :)

yup. works nice.

works good :thumbsup:

I kind of liked Zinio when they first came out on my first TabletPC, but I found I had little time to browse magazines on my laptop. Later I just let the script die, not really sure why. Anyway, I think it is a good idea to port the idea to the iPod Touch/iPhone but I think it won't really take off unless there's some type of off-line mode you can cue in. I don't really see myself chilling at my home surfing the web on my iPod Touch when I can use my laptop or much larger HTPC to browse the Internet, then there's the problem of what to do when you're travelling and there's no wifi point available to pass time reading the latest mags on a pretty darn small screen. Hmm, guess time will tell. I'll probably give them a whirl to see how things look, but w/o the option of off-line viewing, my curiousity will die out pretty quickly.

Thanks for the cool link & work-around, first place I heard of it and I check Engadget a few times a day! :thumbsup: