I’m an early-adopter nut for different things and one thing that I think is cool is being able to do banking type things from my phone. I heard about CitiMobile a while ago, but it wasn’t actually available for anyone to use until recently. When I went to the web site to sign up, I was disappointed to see that T-Mobile isn’t actually supported.
This is kind of lame because while the lower tier T-Mobile data plans don’t let you do things like CitiMobile or Opera Mini, the T-Mobile Total Data plan does. I really wanted to use this service, and have it not possibly send stuff to someone else’s number (registering a phone number and getting the link does actually work on other phones, as long as you put in the number for the phone).
So here were the steps I took to get the servie registered with the right phone number on an unsupported carrier and handset:
1) Find a trustworthy friend with a supported handset (you need a pin number to login anyway, so it’s less bad than it sounds)
2) Have the service send that handset a message
3) Send a message to the handset whose number you want on any carrier
4) Add a second handset as soon as possible
5) Retrieve the URL from the first handset. In my case it looked something like this: http://citimobile.da-us.citibank.com/svctl/Provisioning?rt=3&at=99&uid=12345.
6) Go to the target handset and keep incrementing the number on the url and installing the application until it lets you use that number to login.
7) Remove the dummy handset with the friend’s number.
Voila, CitiMobile on a T-Mobile V360.
Note: Since this technique relies upon the fact that they use predictible URLs, it helps if you do it at a time when they aren’t likely to get a lot of requests to minimize the possibility of trying to use someone else’s URL for your phone.
