I'm traveling abroad this week (to Israel) and want to bring my verizon nexus to use as a camera and to talk to my kids via skype (wifi only), and want to avoid racking up any extra roaming charges. I'll have a local phone to use for phone calls. Upon searching the forums, I found a post which asks my question as well as I ever could, so I'm going to copy (and thank) science_man_29's previous post. Thanks to science_man_29, and thanks to anyone else who can help out with an answer!
"A friend and I will be venturing away from the United States to Israel in the near-ish future. We would like to use our phones (a Galaxy Nexus and HTC Rhyme, both on Verizon) as alarm clocks/ebook readers/cameras while we're there. If we run across wi-fi, we'd like to be able to use that, but that isn't a necessity. The most important thing is to avoid roaming data and roaming calls.
I'm looking for advice on how to best avoid these charges.
Here are my thoughts so far - please let me know if these will work or if you suggest something else:
* Airplane mode (can we still use wi-fi in airplane mode?)
* Turning "mobile network" off (this should prevent data over cell networks, but should still allow wi-fi, right?)
* On the Galaxy Nexus, I can manually limit the data using ICS controls
Here are my questions:
* Are we likely to rack up roaming charges just by being in another country (getting time info, etc?)
* If someone manages to call us and we don't answer, that shouldn't use any minutes and therefore we shouldn't get charged roaming, right?
* The Galaxy Nexus has a removable SIM card - would it be smart to take that out? Can I store ebooks on the internal memory? Will the phone still work as an alarm clock, etc without the SIM card?
Sorry if this is a dumb question - I've never taken my cell phone abroad before."
-- Seth
"A friend and I will be venturing away from the United States to Israel in the near-ish future. We would like to use our phones (a Galaxy Nexus and HTC Rhyme, both on Verizon) as alarm clocks/ebook readers/cameras while we're there. If we run across wi-fi, we'd like to be able to use that, but that isn't a necessity. The most important thing is to avoid roaming data and roaming calls.
I'm looking for advice on how to best avoid these charges.
Here are my thoughts so far - please let me know if these will work or if you suggest something else:
* Airplane mode (can we still use wi-fi in airplane mode?)
* Turning "mobile network" off (this should prevent data over cell networks, but should still allow wi-fi, right?)
* On the Galaxy Nexus, I can manually limit the data using ICS controls
Here are my questions:
* Are we likely to rack up roaming charges just by being in another country (getting time info, etc?)
* If someone manages to call us and we don't answer, that shouldn't use any minutes and therefore we shouldn't get charged roaming, right?
* The Galaxy Nexus has a removable SIM card - would it be smart to take that out? Can I store ebooks on the internal memory? Will the phone still work as an alarm clock, etc without the SIM card?
Sorry if this is a dumb question - I've never taken my cell phone abroad before."
-- Seth