Tall Mike

Apple Iphone owners get to view free digital magazines of 70 or so popular magazines without costs, courtesy of Zinio and Texterity, including Popular Mechanics, PC Magazine, and U.S. News & World Report.

However, non-iPhone/iPod touch browsers can also score free access using the User Agent Switcher extension for Firefox or a simple Safari tweak.

All that needs to be done is change the User Agent in your browser to the one of the iPhone which will trick the website into thinking that you are accessing it with an iPhone. This in turn will give you access to those magazines, among them PC Magazine, Technology Review, Macworld, Lonely Planet and, um, Playboy and Penthouse.

The content is provided in full screen in your browser and you can flip through the pages with a click. It’s probably not the most comfortable way but it’s free and easy enough. Pages are actually shown as images which means they can be saved to the local hard drive.

In Safari, set your browser to the iPhone user agent in the Develop menu, which you can enable at Preferences->Advanced->”Show Develop menu in menu bar.”

Opera users have built-in user agent switching for iPhones

Firefox users can install the User Agent Switcher add-on and configure it with the following User Agent:

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)

Then switch to that User Agent and visit the Zinio or Texterity.