Access Facebook on any Mobile Without the Internet.

Do you have an old mobile phone, like the Nokia 1100, that has no browser and can do little more than make phone calls? Or are you stuck in some remote place where there’s no Internet or no other form of data (EGDE/GPRS/3G) connectivity is available?

Not a problem. You can still use your Facebook account in India by dialing *325# (or *fbk#) from your mobile phone – this service requires no data plan or Internet and it will even work on phones of the Stone Age. Here’s a quick tour:

 

Use Facebook without the Data Plan

Facebook India has partnered with Fonetwish to bring Facebook on every mobile phone without requiring any apps or even the Internet. You dial the *325# number, then enter your Facebook username and password and you are in. You can then send number based commands to access various features of Facebook, chat with friends who are online, add new people to your friends list, and more.

I played with the service for some time and it was a nice experience overall. If there were a Unix-like shell interface for Facebook, it would be much similar. Fonetwish says that this service is currently available for Airtel, Aircel, Idea and Tata Docomo users in India. It may be too much work to read your Facebook news feed stories one by one but this is a good option to quickly update your Facebook status or for chatting with friends who are online. The price is reasonable too – you just have pay a subscription fee of 1.00 per day for unlimited usage.

Related: If you have an old mobile phone, you can search Google by SMS without requiring a data plan.

The Silliest iOS Issue: No White Backgrounds for App Icons

 

One of the most ironic things about trying to write about apps from an iOS device is how troublesome it can be to find and post a good looking icon image. We try to feature app icons front and center when we talk about apps on iSource, and the easiest way I’ve found to get a good app icon is to simply visit iTunes Preview in a  desktop browser and snap a screenshot of it. For this post, I googled “Photogene2 itunes” and quickly screen-capped a portion of my screen.

Unfortunately, this has proven impossible on my iPhone and iPad, thanks to the instant App Store re-directs that occur after tapping on a link to an app. Regardless of what I do and which browser I use, I simply cannot get the desktop version of the iTunes Preview website to display on my iOS devices. The result is that I’ve got to simply Google an app name and hope that someone out there has posted a high-resolution version of the icon, or use a whole set of tricks in Photoforge to (badly) crop out the non-white borders around an icon.

There was even one point where I thought I could work around all of this nonsense by setting my home screen wallpaper to pure white and then simply take a screenshot of it. But for some strange reason (perhaps for font legibility), iOS insists on adding a gradient to any pure white wallpaper I use, which ends up surrounding app icons in a strange dull grey (which looks terrible against our white background).

This is, of course, a totally niche problem, but it’s a rather significant and ironic one when you try to write about iOS right from the platform. Until the App Store background changes or I think of some sort of workaround, it seems like I’ll always need to do final posts right from a desktop computer to do things properly.