Galaxy Nexus + data plan + VoIP support = free calls!

When I bought my un­locked Galaxy Nexus, I fig­ured that I’d sim­ply use the SIM card in my iPhone 4S with the hand­set. Instead, I pulled the T-Mobile SIM out of my Samsung Galaxy Tab. I’m glad I did be­cause I dis­cov­ered a very ap­peal­ing sce­nar­io. By us­ing the data-on­ly SIM — which costs me $40.00 per mon­th for un­lim­it­ed texts and data — with a new Android 4.0 fea­ture, I’ve turned the Galaxy Nexus in­to a VoIP phone: I can get or re­ceive calls sole­ly through Wi-Fi and mo­bile broad­band net­works with­out sub­scrib­ing to a voice plan. Native SIP sup­port in Android 4.0 Google’s newest mo­bile op­er­at­ing sys­tem ver­sion, known as Ice Cream Sandwich, na­tive­ly sup­ports SIP ac­counts in the Phone di­aler app. This ad­di­tion of SIP sup­port opens up a whole new world of voice pos­si­bil­i­ties. SIP, which stands for Session Initiated Protocol, uni­fies both voice and video over stan­dard IP-based net­works. As voice be­comes data — espe­cial­ly in the fu­ture as LTE net­works are IP-based — this means we’ll have more (...)