Using the Google search engine

Jul 10, 2007 08:04 GMT  ·  By

Matt Cutts, Google engineer, revealed an interesting method to find out the user agent of any iPhone that usually contains information about the browser and the operating system used by any device or computer connected to the Internet. Basically, it can be done with ease using the Google search engine and a special search query that can provide with unexpected results. According to the Google employee, the iPhone was launched with the following user agent:

code
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3
Here's what you must do in order to find out your own user agent (there is no need to have an iPhone, you can test it straight on your computer but it also works with the Apple handheld device): go to Google and type "phpinfo http_user_agent" in the search box. Then, you should look for a result that has the "phpinfo()" in title. Click on the link and once the webpage is fully loaded, look for the PHP Variables menu. In that table, search for the "["HTTP_USER_AGENT"]" string that reveals you the information.

Also, there are several websites available out there that can provide this information but it is more attractive when you take it straight from the best search engine on the Internet. Still, you can try out this page posted by one of the Matt Cutts blog's readers.

iPhone is one of the most long-awaited products ever released by the Cupertino company and, since it was officially launched on June 29, the owners started to search for tips and tricks to customize the device. It was even rumored that an iPhone owner managed to activate the handheld device without the AT&T resources so it's quite obvious that Apple's product started a real mania among the gadget lovers.