Android without a data plan

I have a nexus one that I bought straight from google. I didn't bother getting a data plan. I have wi-fi at home and at work, plus my girlfriend has a data plan on her phone. So I don't really need it much.

I consider it to be a full computer so I use it a lot without data to do many things. What follows is a list of free apps I find useful without a data connection. If you have a data plan you may still find these handy while travelling or if you just want data faster.

For maps I used to use OruxMaps a lot. You use Mobile atlas creator to download a map from the internet and then put it on the phone. I still use it for hiking and camping for tracking routes and satellite maps. It basically turns your phone into those car GPS units that have the maps internally. It's a bit annoying to download the maps but it's reasonably fast. Now that the newest google maps caches the map tiles it's not so important.

iTravelFree is anther great data free app that just recently added maps. It's main purpose is for storing and browsing wikitravel documents. It's a great idea and I'm glad Jon Evans made it. You just search for a city and it goes and downloads it to your phone.

A similar app is WikiDroyd, it's pretty cool - imagine having all of wikipedia on your phone! Well, not all of it will fit unless you remove images and sound and such, but the text is enough. I have a 8gb so I couldn't really fit in the whole english wikipedia so I just have the 10% most popular articles (~350,000). Just like the other apps above you just load in the data on a computer or via wifi on your device.

One neat app I like is the j2me compass app by Dana Peters. I'm guessing your android device has a compass already but if it doesn't it can provide that. It's pretty neat, it just uses your location and time to know where the sun/moon is. From there it knows North. To get it working you have to use the netmite and shut off screen animations in the netmite settings.

Google reader and the android news reader are ok for news but not great. I haven't looked around for better apps that can cache news. The android one has a habit of trying to connect to the internet and wiping out the news cache it had previously.

Google listen is pretty good for downloading podcasts while you have wifi and listening to them later.

I'm also tempted to write an app that loads in transit data. Here in Vancouver I can download 4 months of bus schedules. In that 50mb file it has all you need to know when the next bus is or nearest stop.

Update:
Seems Orux maps has a restricted set of map sources now. Legal trouble..
Also another wiki app is available - okawix, I haven't tried it out yet though.