Will a phone work without a SIM Card? The answer is yes & no. Just right off the bat, we can say that if you have a phone without a SIM card, you should be able to turn it on without a problem. Of course, it has to be properly charged and should ideally not be exhibiting any type of mechanical issue, if you will. If you have a phone without a SIM card that won’t even turn on you may be looking at battery issues. Maybe there’s a problem with your charger, or maybe even the phone is totally fried inside. The problem though is essentially never going to be your SIM card.
The thing is, without a SIM card, you are most likely going to have very limited functionality with your phone. This is true with pretty much any phone on the market. Could you make calls on a phone without a SIM card? The quick answer to this would have been absolutely not. That was until a couple of years ago, of course, before online calling got a real burst. In this article, we want to explore some of the things that you can potentially do with a phone without a SIM card. Spoiler alert, there actually could be a lot of them. If you do this right, you can really take advantage of a phone without a SIM card when traveling. Will a phone work without a SIM card? Again, probably yes, it depends on the phone. Here are some of the topics we are going to cover.
- Will A Phone Work Without A SIM Card – How To Get It To Work
- What Type of Things Can You Do With A Phone Without A SIM Card?
- What Apps Won’t Remain Active
- Will A Phone Work Without A SIM Card – Making Calls
- Getting Data On A Phone Without A SIM Card
- How All Of This Can Help You When Traveling
- Things To Keep In Mind
Will A Phone Work Without A SIM Card – How To Get It To Work
What are you going to need to do first, particularly for older phones is make sure that you’re able to charge it. Once you’re able to charge it, you need to make sure that it powers up properly. As we mentioned before, the lack of a SIM card should not be a deterrent. The phone should light up, and probably one of the first things that is going to pop up on the screen is some type of notice that the phone does not have a SIM card. The problem with some of the very old phones that existed before digital apps became a thing was that you really couldn’t do anything with them without a SIM card. Other than calling 9-1-1. At least that’s what they said you could do, we are not sure if anyone ever tried.
These days, all that you’re going to have to do is get the phone to power up. If you can do that, then you’re going to need to most likely unlock the phone. We are not talking about the unlocking procedure when it’s locked to a particular company. Just so that you can access the main screen without. Once you’re able to access the main screen and scroll through the apps, you’re pretty much golden! Problems may come up, for example, like not remembering a password to be able to unlock the phone. If that’s the case, you may be able to restore it to default settings. The way that you may be able to do that will depend on the device. We really don’t want to get into that too much. That could help some people steal phones, and that’s not something that we want to promote!
What Type of Things Can You Do With A Phone Without A SIM Card?
In pretty much any modern phone, if you’ve been able to really access the device, the only thing that you’ll have left to do is look through the apps. You could potentially still use a lot of the apps that the phone has. A good step when unlocking the phone would be to make sure that it’s hooked up to a Wi-Fi network. If you hook it up to a Wi-Fi network, you should be able to use pretty much any app and functionality that the phone has. Other than the actual mobile phone feature. We are going to explain this more in-depth later on.
Phones without a SIM card though, and with a Wi-Fi connection could be perfect for kids. They can play games on the device and access YouTube. If you want to monitor the type of sites and access that this kid can have to the internet, you could literally delete the internet browser from the phone. That way, a kid would only be able to use the approved apps that you have on the phone. This is not just for kids. If you have a phone that you’re not using anymore it could be a way to give it a little extra life. Send some of the game apps to the old phone so that you don’t have to spend more money on cloud storage or SD cards for that matter. A lot of different apps are going to be able to remain active.
What Apps Won’t Remain Active
There are a couple of apps that are usually tied down to a particular phone number. What happens is that when the app detects the lack of SIM, it may not function properly. Some of the more popular ride-share apps work this way. Uber for example may or may not work accordingly. This one can be a bit of a toss-up. Obviously, the food delivery services on some of these same apps like Uber Eats, and Didi Food may not work properly. It’s not a given that they are going to stop working like some other apps. Particularly if you do have access to the phone number that you first registered on these apps with through another phone.
The other app type that is going to “suffer” without a SIM card are all of the messaging apps. Well, actually not all of them. We’ll get to that though in a bit. All of the apps like WhatsApp that are directly tied to your phone number are going to log you out without a SIM card. There are ways around this. For the most part, though, you’re probably going to see that the app won’t work. Particularly if the phone number that you registered on the app with is being used on another device. From there, most apps should remain active. We may be missing a couple, but the two biggest categories are those that we mentioned.
Will A Phone Work Without A SIM Card – Making Calls
Probably one of the main reasons you may have clicked on a phone that works without a SIM card, will have been to learn if you can make a call with such a phone. The answer is … yes, and no! You are not going to be able to make a direct call from the regular phone “app” that you use probably on a regular basis to make your calls. Why is that? It’s pretty simple, the SIM card is pretty much the connection between your phone and a service provider. You need that to be able to get into the service provider’s system to make a call. As we mentioned before, phones without a SIM can supposedly dial 9-1-1 exclusively. Does that mean calls are off the table?
Not really, potentially, you should be able to make phone calls through apps. We just mentioned though that a lot of the apps that allow you to make calls through the internet will be disabled. What can you do? Well, the apps that won’t be disabled are the ones that you use your email to log into instead of your phone number. These are going to be apps like Skype, Zoom, or even Google Meets. You could even make calls through Facebook Messenger. All that you need to do is make sure that the phone is connected to a network. There are a couple of ways that you can do that as well!
Just to quickly recap this point. You’re going to be able to make calls through different apps. You need to make sure though that you can access these apps through your email address and not your phone number. Also, accessing these apps should not require 2 step verification. If that’s the case then you would need to have a phone with an active SIM card on hand. When you need that it kind of eliminates the point of “will a phone work without a SIM card”!
Getting Data On A Phone Without A SIM Card
There’s really only one way to be able to get data on a phone without a SIM card. You need to connect to a network via Wi-Fi. That being said, there are going to be different ways to do just that. For example, if you’re at home, it’s going to be easy to connect to your home Wi-Fi network and get data that way. If you’re abroad, you can connect to a hotel network or to a coffee shop Wi-Fi or something like that.
The other option that you’re going to have is to get a portable wifi device. This is an interesting option because it removes the need to get SIM cards for multiple people. We are going to talk about this more in a little bit. If you’re traveling, though, with a group it can make sense. The other option that you’re going to have is to use someone else’s phone is a Wi-Fi hotspot and connect to their network. That’s another one of the options that you may want to look into if you’re traveling! In pretty much every case, though, it’s making sure you connect your device to a Wi-Fi network.
How All Of This Can Help You When Traveling
When you’re traveling, you are typically going to want to make sure that you monitor the amount of data that you use. Just because data is typically going to be way more expensive when you’re abroad than when you’re at home. That applies to people in every country. If you’re traveling with kids, for example, it could be a little hard to trust them to monitor their data usage. The best thing that you can do is to give them a phone without a SIM card. They can get data on different points during the journey. That’s the most effective way to avoid roaming costs. If the SIM card is not active, there’s no way that you can get hit with roaming costs.
Another option is to literally take a couple of burner phones and use a mobile Wi-Fi spot to get coverage when you’re abroad. Again, this would be a very effective way to be able to avoid roaming fees. One of the problems with a mobile Wi-Fi spot is the fact that it’s typically still a very expensive way to get coverage. If prices drop on some of these, though, they can become more of an option for travelers. No SIM card equals no roaming fees. That’s something important that you may want to keep in mind.
Will A Phone Work Without A SIM Card: Things To Keep In Mind
There are essentially two things that you are going to be missing out on when you don’t have a SIM card. Those things are going to be direct calls from your phone. Also, texting from your phone directly is something that you are not going to be able to do. All of the texting and the calls that you make are going to have to be made through apps. Without some type of wifi coverage, what you’re going to be able to do with your phone is very limited. There’s really not much to do in these cases except make sure that your phone is connected to some type of network.
There’s a chance that some of the apps will stop working on an older phone. That’s not necessarily something that has to do directly with the fact that you don’t have a SIM card. Except for some of these apps that we talked about like WhatsApp or Telegram. Those types of apps could see some issues if you don’t have a SIM card. The problem with older devices is that updates are not going to be available, and you’ll start seeing that what you can do in certain apps may diminish! Will a phone work without a SIM card, though? For us, the answer is absolutely yes. You just need to make sure that you know how to get the most out of those devices!