General

soundwave said:
Fairly certain if you use a smartphone these companies will start charging you for a data package, so that wont work either.

No, they won't. And t-mobile value plans don't even require data since the phone is purchased at full price. Not like that even matters, just a side note. You can use any gsm phone and not pay a data plan. As you will see in the other message I posted, a data plan is only required when getting the phone at a subsidized price from a corporate branch of the company. If they buy the phone on craigslist, or ebay, or from their friend Timmy down the street nobody cares nor will at&t or t-mobile 'magically' put them on required data plans without authorization from an account holder or authorized user. People do it all the time.

CDMA you can't get away with that since phones are only activated for service based on IMEI. And an IMEI that requires data will not be activated without it. That's a bit different than just sticking a sim card in.