Verizon PDA Phone w/out data plan?

[Aknosis]

I'm due for a new phone in March and I really want to get a phone with Email capabilities however I do not want to pay the ridiculous price for verizon's data plan. Are you required to buy the data plan regardless? Or can you just buy the phone service, I was looking at the Samsung i760 and would prefer to use the wifi for my email, the places I am most are home and work and both have wifi.

From what I've read you cannot get pay per use for data plans anymore from verizon but is it possible to not buy it at all and just use the wifi connection for my data use?

 

[uli2000]

Yes, its possible, but you wont get the promo pricing for the device. Retail from VZW on a xv6800 or i760 will be around $500, not sure if you can get a ne2 discount if you dont buy the data plan. If you do it, make sure you call verizon and get a data block for cellular data, otherwise, pay per use data is $20/mb.

 

[Raduque]

You can still get NE2 without a data package. You'll also get any mail in rebates available, but you'll only get the "Advance Device Discount" if you purchase a data package and keep it active for 3 months.

 

[imported_Mike]

If you go with the i760 make sure you get a good one. I got 2 bad ones and switched to a blackberry instead. Common problems verizon doesn't have fixes for, except for hard resets.

 

[rh71]

Originally posted by: Raduque
You can still get NE2 without a data package. You'll also get any mail in rebates available, but you'll only get the "Advance Device Discount" if you purchase a data package and keep it active for 3 months.

What if you had the EN-MOU plan where it was usage by minutes? I still had that on my Treo 600 last month but I got a new XV6800 recently and fear that they moved me to pay per kb (had to choose this instead of data plan during purchase online) instead of pay by minutes. My plan was never changed, only activated this new phone.

 

[QueBert]

you should know this about data usage, I had a Motorola Q, there were periods where I didn't have a data plan at all. paying per kb is fine, I wasn't using data, but the phone was accessing stuff on it's own. Not sure if you can disable outgoing, but I know I had checked and in a few days 350k of data usage was coming up. That would be $3.50 @ their per kb rate. Not sure how common that is for a few days with no use, but if it kept up like that for a month it would have been cheaper to get the low end data package.

 

[Sqube]

You can disable data, but IIRC it prevents you from receiving PIX/FLIX messages. I don't know how important that is to you.