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Help Using Droid without a plan, Wifi only.

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Darklink

Newbie
My wife and I got our awesome Motorola Droid's when they first came out. We got added to a friend's verizon account at a good price. We are not sure this friend is going to be able to keep making their payments.. and ending our service. Not having much money ourselves recently, I'm looking at all my options.

If our phone plans were shut off, one or both of them.. Could the phone's still work using just wifi? Turning it into like an ipod touch. 99% of the time my wife only uses her phone at home on our wifi. I don't know if we need to keep paying 30$/month for 3G access.

I'm pretty surprised that I couldn't figure this out on google or looking through these forums.

I'm guessing it's probably possible, but would I still have access to the market? And if I didn't have access to the market.. how hard is it to get apps elsewhere?


Thanks so much in advance
 
Yep. Just a month after I got my Droid, I needed to spend 4 months out of the country. There was no cost-efficient option to get service there, so I had them temporarily suspend my account. No 3G whatsoever. All the on-phone functions worked just fine. No calls, of course. I didn't have Google Voice, then; I do now. I'm not sure if that works without 3G or not. I wasn't happy with the WIFI performance, but I think that was just the signal strength in Germany. It seemed to be a problem with laptops, too. So as far as I know, as long as you have a good WIFI connection, it should be fine for the purposes you're talking about.
 
Google Voice most definitely works without 3G. In fact, it is why I switched to it immediately. +unlimited SMS.

But, yeah, WiFi only should be no problem. getting phone access is gonna be an issue, though, as Kessie said.
 
Yes you can use it without the phone functionality and can still make calls via wifi. You can use free service like Google Voice but I think you still need Gizmo account to be able to use it on your phone. You can also check out cheap VoIP services like Onesuite which you can set up with Sipdroid softphone. I just got my Android and been calling via VoIP for the past few days.

Market is still available as long as you have internet access. If you have an internet service at home with wifi router then you can pretty much use your phone as a phone even without a carrier signal using VoIP.

No need to have 3G either.
 
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