Need iDisk access from a Windows Mobile phone? Opera Mobile 9.5 ought to do it.

Idisk_2Late last week, I heard from a reader who was looking for a very specific mobile solution. Jeff has a .Mac account and wanted to access his iDisk with a Windows Mobile device. He appeared to be pretty much up the creek without a paddle. I knew that folks were accessing iDisk with their Symbian S60 Third Edition, Feature Pack 2 devices, but the sticky wicket is that an iDisk client uses WebDAV for access. I searched high and low for Jeff, but generally came up empty.

He wasn’t going to be denied, however and that’s good news for others wanting a solution. Turns out that you might have access once Opera Mobile 9.5 becomes available. Jeff used a beta build and then changed the User Agent settings; the string that tells the server what browser is being used. He found out that using the Firefox user agent string in Opera Mobile 9.5 gave him web access to his iDisk from his Windows Mobile phone. The solution wasn’t 100% perfect as Jeff couldn’t use the touchscreen to navigate the folder structure, but hardware keys saved the day. Sweet for those that have a .Mac account! You can find the details behind his efforts on the Apple forums here, but of course, we’ll have to see if this works when Opera officially releases the new mobile browser. I can’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work at that point, so I suspect you folks will be good to go! That should about do it for my daily "goofy little PDA software" quota as well. ;)

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