Ingenious Android App Allows Web Browsing Over SMS

If you have an Mechanical man smartphone and a T-mobile unlimited text edition architectural plan, there's a unused, free, fashio to shop the web. Smozzy Beta, developed by Jeff Donahue is a unloosen app available happening the Android commercialise that is at the start-glance simply a wrapper for the collective-in vane browser. The brilliant difference is that instead of transferring data over 3G, packets are transmitted and received completely via text message (SMS and MMS).

So how does it cultivate? About URLs can be sent inside the 160-character constraint of SMS (if non, they are simply broken aweigh in multiple messages). The resulting web page is then sent over in a evenhandedly hackish manner: the entire site is loaded on Smozzy's remote server and closed in a Nada file. The ZIP file is encoded as a hacked PNG paradigm file, which is an acceptable file to be sent over MMS (in parts, if necessary). The Smozzy app simply reverses the process and displays site content.

The developer recommends only when using Smozzy if you feature an unlimited texting plan. Since all data is transferred over school tex message, you could emphatically check out your message throttl quickly if you don't- a trifle counter-intuitive if you're the kind of person interested in rescue along 3G usance.

Speed of Smozzy is purportedly usable but aside no means as fast as 3G. The publicity of site data, the fastness of SMS, and reliance on Smozzy's remote server are all bottlenecks. Another issue is that Smozzy does not currently support SSL encryption. This is plausibly an Sooner State limitation- since data is transmitted via plain textual matter and filtered through Smozzy's unlikely server, you probably wouldn't want to do whatever online banking with this anyhow.

While this would be a great app for those multiplication when 3G is unavailable, I wouldn't recommend T-waterborne users immediately pass kayoed and cancel their data plans at this time. This is a hack and if T-mobile figures out how to detect its usage, I don't opine they would pause sealing it up on their end. In any case, kudos to Smozzy developer Jeff Donahue for a all but righteous hack. Today if you could only work how to package VoIP over SMS you'd rattling take something!

[via ExtremeTech]

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Mike Keller is PCWorld's resident iOS developer nerd. Catch Diary of a Developer (at least) every Tuesday present at GeekTech.