Exactly a year after I switched from pre to droid, I broke another cell phone contract. So there seem to be three fool-proof ways to get out of a cell phone contract in the US, despite all the hype about them involving signing away your firstborn.
- Switch to a different US cell phone company, and do it by going into a store and finding a hungry salesman in person, and making his sale contingent on him finding a way to break your old contract. What I did last year.
- Simply move to a part of the map that doesn't have cell phone coverage. (You will have seen these parts of the map from a plane.) It probably helps to have your cell phone drop off the edge of their map repeatedly for some months, presumably they can look this stuff up. Call up technical support, go thru some mild rigamarole as they try to configure your phone to magically see cell towers that have several mountains and/or the curvature of the Earth blocking line of site to you. Magic words: "please note on account: no cell service"
- Sell your contract on one of the existing cell contract exchanges, to someone who wants cell service with a shorter than usual contract. (Means giving up your number.) I haven't tried this one, maybe next time?
Unlike my Palm Pre which didn't survive being cut off the cell net, my Android phone is still fairly happy. While I'd really like to turn it into a proper Debian box, with X etc, I may just use it as a camera, web browsing (on wifi) and emergency 911 system. Pity though about the GPS stuff needing an internet connection when the phone has many gigabytes of free space that could hold a useful map.
(If you want to phone me now, the number is 1-423-IKIWIKI. I only receive voice mail, and your call data and transcript will be absorbed by the Google Borg.)
If you're content with a plain map, no navigation, the MapDroyd application seems to be nice. It lets you download maps for a specific geographic area, in vector format. The entire world takes about 8 gigs, I think.
Better maps of Edinburgh than Google has, for example.
FWIW, I get my offline map fix with Locus.
If you have Froyo or newer, you can simply view interesting places Google Maps and it will cache the vectors locally. With older versions of Android, you get the old Maps which uses raster images and does not cache any useful amount.
I was pointed to http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Windows_Mobile at Chemnitzer Linuxtage because I have the same issue with my WinMobile6 “thing” (it’s not strictly speaking a phone, more like a GPSr+PDA, as I bought it for GPS and geocaching and put in a prepaid GSM card of another provider in for being callable by some people for free). Anyway, it’s got no data contract, so I’m using WLAN (Wifi) if at all, but mostly offline. I was even considering buying some navigation solution, but will look at them. Maybe I’ll still buy as I don’t trust Wikis and OSM entirely, but there’s a cheap alternative, or a dozen………
To make a long comment short, there’s http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Software/Mobilephones which links to http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Android which contains a lot of software. Hope this helps.
Huh, what’s Markdown and otl? Where’s the “Plain Old Text” option? ☺