Android development with non-contract, unconnected phone?

Instead of shelling out ~$600+ for an unlocked Android development phone device can you use a used phone that is not connected to any wireless carrier?

I see Android phones for sale on Craigslist all the time that people want to get rid of whenever they get an upgrade. They are usually a year old at least but as long as it is in working order that's okay with me.

Are there any downsides to this? Can you use these phones as legit development devices? Are they crippled or anything if they are disconnected from a carrier? They can't make calls or send/receive text messages obviously. But 开发者_JAVA百科as long as you can use them with a WiFi connection it seems like you'd be able to test quite a bit.

Precisely what you said. You can't make calls/receive texts, but for development it's good enough. Don't know actually if Market will work, but you will find out soon enough.

The only thing that comes to mind is that locations are often provided by carrier networks. You will then need to be connected with WiFi or use GPS to find your locations.

The emulator works pretty well and then you wont need an actual phone. Unless of course you want access to the sensors. Even then you could use the monkey tool to simulate sensor input.

You can use any android phone for your development. So far all the phones I have ever seen has a development menu under preferences. As long you enable debugging and installing unknown apps it should be fine. For full system access you would need rooted phones, it does not matter if the phones is locked to a carrier or not.

Although you can develop on the emulator, you might fail because of the mobile network speed, device io and touch sensitivity. It is best to at least test on a device before publishing. Meanwhile most modern phones run faster than the emulator so if you are ok on emulator you should more than ok on the real device.

I work with several no-contract/no-sim phones with no problem. My first dev phone was a used T-Mobile myTouch 3g (that I bought on Craigslist). The great thing about T-mobile is that you can pop in a pre-paid SIM and get 3g data when you need it for $1.49 per day.