It’s a Samsung Galaxy s III and was thinking I could use it as a music storage/palyer. Any way to do this? Thanks in advance.
A phone doesn’t require cell service.
I used my first smart phone for several months with Wi-Fi at home.
You don’t even need WiFi to play music. If you have an App like VLC player.
You may have to find a WiFi hot spot to open the Play Store and install Apps. Otherwise your set.
VLC plays any music or video stored on your phone.
I prefer X-PLORE. It’s a file manager, photo viewer and media player.
The same ways you would play music on a new phone. You don’t need to have an active SIM card to connect a phone to wifi.
Either install whatever streaming apps you like (Google Play Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, ,DI, Spotify, etc. etc.)
Or load mp3’s on the phone (from your computer via a USB cable or via Dropbox etc. ) and get an mp3 player app.
God I am getting old. When the OP said “old phone” my immediate thought was this.
Me too. To play LPs. 
Where? It’s only big enough for CDs.
Is that the headphone on top? How can it reach both ears?
Other than play music, you can also create it by using FakeBlock to turn your phone into a virtual woodblock.
No, that’s a modern phone. You must be one of them young’uns. My actual recollection of an “old phone” is this. 
Notice the long, non-coiled handset cord, and the different body shape.
We would have been thrilled if it could play 78 RPMs!
Anyway, I was given a nice new Samsung J3 smartphone by my carrier (without a contract, even) because my old phone no longer supported its new standards. I still don’t use it as a smartphone and don’t subscribe to data. My favorite feature is where you can dial a number and speak to somebody far away just by talking into a hole in it and hearing the other person’s voice through another hole that you hold up to your ear. The tele-phone: voice at a distance! Still a great concept!
But it’s great for Internet and email at home over WiFi and at WiFi hotspots. I haven’t yet started using it in any big way as a music player, but I did confirm that it was trivial to copy MP3 files to it over USB (though not over WiFi like I can do with the tablet), and that capability should be independent of whether there is an active SIM card.
An iPhone without a SIM that works is simply like the full-sized iPods, able to run apps, play music, surf the net with WiFi, etc. (In fact, it will receive text messages from other Apple devices since it would use the Apple cloud instead of the phone system) I assume the same applies to Android.
I keep my old Galaxy S3 in my bedroom, on silent. I can’t be woken up overnight by someone calling/emailing me but I can otherwise use it to check email/interwebz when I want to. A couple of modern apps won’t work because it’s an older version of Android but for the most part, it does everything my current phone does except voice/text & only because there’s no SIM card in it.
I never owned a Galaxy, but I JUST did this last week with an old HTC Incredible. If you want TMI, keep reading…
I got tired of using my regular cell phone as my music source in my car. (No need to explain why.) I had an old Incredible and so I decided to use it. I did a hard reset, which caused some heartache because the phone wanted me to register it with Verizon (my old provider) when it booted. Turns out you just have to “attempt” to register it three or four times and it will let you past that screen.
A nice feature of the Incredible is that it will accept 32 GB Micro SD cards, so I have plenty of storage on it. Of course, both the WiFi and the Bluetooth still work, so it’s got those features available. When I’m at home or at a WiFi point, I can stream all the audio I want. It logs on to Google Play and other stores without issues.
Another benefit was that I had previously upgraded the internal battery, so I have lots of juice even if I don’t power it from a cord in the car. If I don’t need the Bluetooth, I put the thing in airplane mode, which significantly extends the battery life.
I opted for JetAudio Plus as a player, even though it costs a few bucks. Works great on Snapdragon and it closely mimics my Cowon iAudio players as far as EQ and audio settings.
As far as sound quality…it’s OK, but not at the level of Beats. The phone is providing a low-level audio signal to the car system, so I don’t really need much power. With reasonable headphones, it’s acceptable. If I want to rock out, I need to add an external amp.
TL;DR: Great way to recycle old cell phones!
Feh. My immediate first thought was this. No confusing dials, you picked up the thing and told a real, live, person who you wanted to talk to. Now, get off my lawn!
How depends on how much technical knowledge you have. In broad terms:
- Turn on the phone
- Copy the music you want to it, preferably MP3 files since they are the standard. You can make a folder called Music on the phone if you don’t already have one, and put the files in there.
- See if you have an app called “Music”, that should list and play the songs found on your phone. There are also many music player apps on the Google Play store.
If your phone doesn’t have enough storage, a 64GB microSD card can be bought for around $23 and will hold well over 10,000 songs. If you don’t have that much music smaller capacity cards are cheaper.
As far as getting some decent sound quality, the two main options are using a 1/8" male to 1/8" male cable to plug into a car or stereo, or connecting your phone wirelessly to Bluetooth speakers.