Using a Verizon iPhone 4 (no sim card) as an iPod touch.

no that is not true. when you configure your iphone, you can use it as an ipod. if youre buying from verizon though and it says that its 0 dollars activation, that means you have to get a plan. if you want to buy an iphone as an ipod however, you would have to pay more than you would have to pay for an ipod.

if youre buying without a sim card, you dont need one

The Verizon iPhone has the SIM card inside and not user-accessible.

The Verizon iPhone has no SIM card at all. It does not have an internal SIM card. (I don't want people to go looking for it). CDMA phones do not use SIM cards. Instead the MEID (Mobile Equipment Identifier) of the phone is recognized by the network.

TheChaka wrote:

I'm buying the phone off craigslist, and I want to know if I'll be able to use it as an iPod without having to pay for a service agreement. I just want to listen to music.

Yes, you certainly can. You will still want to plug it into iTunes and activate it with Apple (has notthing to do with cellular service) so you can download music and apps to it. An iPhone not associated with a cellular service contract is effectively nothing more than an iPod Touch anyway.

If the seller does not do so, you'd be best to also do a full restore on it to set it up as new for yourself and your content and use.

Since this is a CDMA iPhone, in order to be sure the cellular radio is not wasting power, just enable airplane mode, then re-enable just wifi. That will leave the cellular radio OFF and power on just the wifi radio.

I used my old iPhone 3Gs as an iPod Touch for a good couple of years, no problems with that intended use.

(p.s. if this was a GSM iPhone, then yes, you would need a SIM, any SIM, in it in order to activate it in iTunes. For a CDMA phone, you simply skip that part of the process - just plug it in and activate in iTunes).

Lawrence Finch wrote:

The Verizon iPhone has no SIM card at all. It does not have an internal SIM card. (I don't want people to go looking for it). CDMA phones do not use SIM cards. Instead the MEID (Mobile Equipment Identifier) of the phone is recognized by the network.

Yes, there was a post recently where someone tried that. Took the back off and the battery out. It did not end well. 🙂

Just for clarification of anyone not familiar (probably doesn't mean you, Lawrence!), the Verizon iPhone 4 does not SIM slot. The Verizon iPhone 4S has a SIM slot for GSM roaming but it is not required for the phone to be activated. The Verizon iPhone 5 has a SIM slot and a 4G LTE SIM or GSM SIM is required for activation.

Yes, with an old Verizon iPhone4 you can put it into Airplane Mode, so it does not search for a cellular network.

However, iMessage keeps giving the message "you must disable Airplane Mode to send or receive messages".

So, you are kinda stuck, unless someone has figured out how to work around this.

The workaround is to turn on WiFi. You can turn it on while in Airplane Mode.

Michael Black, will this also apply to an iPhone 4S? My cell plan expires in October and I am thinking of dumping it and using my iPhone 4S as an iPod Touch and getting an old fashioned land line back again ( how vaguely luddite of me!). I never talk on my cell phone, just text and surf the web and I am almost always around a wifi network that is accessible!

This works great and saves your battery power when you are connected to a wireless network!