The iPhone is one of the best smartphones on the market, but if you can’t afford to own a smartphone, the iPod Touch can be a surprising alternative. Here’s how to replace an iPhone with an iPod Touch.
You can buy an iPhone for as little as $0 up front, but that’s a subsidized price you pay in exchange for signing a two-year contract. This means you have to pay monthly service fees to use that iPhone for two years, otherwise you’ll pay a hefty early termination fee of up to $350.
Monthly service fees can also be quite expensive, with the cheapest individual plans costing around $50 a month, which adds up to $1,200 over two years, and a two-person plan can go over $100 a month.
Instead, you can get a “feature phone” that doesn’t have 3G or LTE and go for a prepaid plan that lets you pay much less than you would for a data plan, but if you still want the smartphone experience without the high monthly costs, an iPod Touch is an excellent may be an alternative.
Here’s how you can use an iPod Touch as a kind of iPhone.
Get Mobile Hotspot
This isn’t necessarily necessary, but it can really help. The biggest disadvantage of using an iPod Touch over an iPhone is the inability to get an internet connection almost everywhere.
iPod Touch can only connect to WiFi, so if you’re in a place without WiFi, you’re out of luck if you don’t have a mobile hotspot. These disk-shaped devices allow you to provide internet only to your WiFi-enabled devices in places with data service.
you can buy Mobile hotspot from Verizon Pay as low as $0.99 and $50 per month for 4GB of data after signing a two-year contract. Of course, if you’re going to pay that much, you can buy an iPhone and pay for a smartphone plan, but there are other options.
Freedom Pop and Mixed are two companies that provide free data that give you a small amount each month without having to pay a penny. Sure, there isn’t a lot of data, but if you need it, you can add more to your plan for just a few dollars.
Use Google Voice for Phone Calls
Because iPod Touch cannot make or receive phone calls by default, you need to add this feature yourself. The good news is that it’s not that difficult and only requires an app download.
With google voice, you can get your own phone number and make and receive phone calls just like on an iPhone. The only caveat is that you’re on a WiFi or data connection and need some earbuds with a microphone as the iPod Touch doesn’t have a headset. But the device has a microphone and speaker, so you can use Google Voice in speaker mode if you want.
If you’re calling from within the US, it’s free to call people in the US and Canada, but Fees for using Google Voice in other countriesbut not more than a few cents per minute.
iMessage
You can use iMessage on your iPod Touch, but other iOS device users will need to send messages to your associated email address instead of using a phone number. Unfortunately, you cannot add your Google Voice phone number to iMessage.
However, the Google Voice app includes text messages, so if someone sends a text message to your Google Voice number, it will show up in the Google Voice app and you can reply from there. You can also send text messages to people through the app.
