All righty then, my phone downgrade is complete. The iPhone is still capable of 9-1-1 but now my primary phone is one of the ruggedized models. It being a basic phone it could only manage a 16GB microSD card, but then my iPhone was the 16GB model so no loss in memory for pics and mp3.

Next I'll take what was an iPhone and is now more of an enhanced iPod and see how well location services works. I have a sneaky suspicion the phone still connects (PING) and is visible to the network, it just can't make or receive calls because the number is now assigned to a different unit. I think, maybe, not really sure how that works.

Edit: Location works great. The app "Tom's GPS" came up with an accurate Lat-Long within seconds and the Maps app was also dead-on. As for signal strength, the phone is seeing the network, 3 out of 5 Bars, so despite it not having service associated, it can still ping just fine.