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Turned Off iPhone Gets $4800 Bill from AT&T
Tech.Luver writes "Jay Levy says he has been stung by Apple's iPhone pact with AT&T after he took an iPhone on a Mediterranean cruise.
They didn't use their phones, but when they got back they had a 54-page monthly bill of nearly $4,800 from AT&T Wireless.
The problem was that their three iPhones were racking up a bill for data charges using foreign phone charges. The iPhone regularly updates e-mail, even while it's off, so that all the messages will be available when the user turns it on. ""
This is why things should actually be OFF when you turn them off. What if it interferes with hospital equipment like other cells, even if it's off?
Why should he be hit with a $4,800 bill when he thought that the device was off? If anything, why shouldn't AT&T and Apple be legally liable for deceiving him into thinking that the device was turned off when in fact it wasn't.
The iPhone updates email even when it's off?
Then how is it legal to carry it on airplane or somewhere where it requires to operate in complete radio-off mode?
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
If the international data plan charges $24 per 20MB, and they got a bill for $4800, that means the 3 phones, while turned off, downloaded a total of around 4GB. WTF?
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
It was OFF.
How the hell is an END USER supposed to jump to the conclusion that OFF doesn't mean OFF. Every other phone I have EVER seen is actually OFF when you turn it OFF.
You're completely off base. This is a seriously major design flaw, of that there is no question.
No Comment.
The only correct resolution is for Apple & ATT to eat these charges until the iPhone's GSM radio can be set to OFF when not inside the coverage of the selected carrier.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
He deserves a huge bill simply because he brought his iPhone(s) to another country? I don't think so. I'm all for personal responsibility, but it's not like he was intentionally using the phone. He had them turned off and could reasonably have assumed it wasn't going to be accessing the network.
ich muß mehr Kuhglocke haben
No, people just have to learn the difference between "sleep" and "power off".
From the grandfather article:
"In countries outside the plan, charges can run from $5 to $20 per megabyte, said Ben Wilson, editor of iPhone Atlas, a Web site owned by the online news company CNet."
I'm guessing that the middle of the Mediterranean is outside of the covered countries. It also says they were checking a total of seven different email accounts. 7 accounts * 20$/MB could add up pretty quickly, 35MB per email account would do it.
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
I've used Cingular for three years now, with no surprises and no unpleasantness. I alsays got an itemized bill showing calls placed and minutes used in those calls, and never went over my minutes.
Then AT&T bought them out, and I got a nasty surprise in the mail - instead of my normal <$50 bill, it was doubled. And the bill was no longer itemized; there was no way to do the math myself.
Then the next bill came - GULP! Four hundred God damned dollars! And still not itemized.
AT&T is run by thieves. I'm using a cheap Trac phone now until I can find another carrier. AT&T are now in my "Die, damn you" list of evil corporations. Sony replaced Microsoft as first place in my list of Pure Evil (TM) corporations when they trojaned my PC with their BMG XCP rootkit, now MS has slid to #3. AT&T is now a very close second to Sony. May their President, CEO, board of directors, and stockholders all catch cancer and aids and die horribly, and may that God damned company go bankrupt and be liquidated.
Mods, this isn't flamebait it's an informative FLAME. As I'm posting AC you know I'm not karma-whoring.
As I'm too busy unsucsessfully chasing women to blog about evil corporations lately, this is probably all I'll have to say about these bastards.
-mcgrew (sm62704)
I would say "because he shouldn't have to". I mean, you and I would think of that if we realized that it was accessing the network even when "off" but I wouldn't expect an average person to think that far into it. And since Apple is trying to create a product to be marketed to the average person, they should make some relatively simple option for saying "off means off".
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10
Many here have commented that there is an 'airplane mode' for the thing, and that's what he should have used. Maybe so, but that is counterintuitive to the average user. He's not on the plane anymore!
If there were a selection called "Hotel Mode" that did the same thing, would you expect him to choose that when boarding an aircraft? No.
How about a simple "Off". Trying to be too cute with the operations makes people like this frustrated. And gives the company bad press.
And he brought it with him, because... why, exactly? You're on a mediterranean cruise and alledgedly your phone just happened to be there too. Switched off all the time.
Yea right. MY guess is that he did indeed switch it on occasionally. If only to show it off to his fellow iPassengers.
B.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
Unless you have a simple pay-as-you-go phone or device, it's too easy to overspend in a situation like this where you just have NO IDEA how much your device is costing you on a moment-by-moment basis.
What I'd appreciate is a device that lets you enter an EXPECTED monetary budget for its use, and safeguards to make sure you don't use the device in a manner that exceeds your expectations for how expensive its use should be.
The instant it began international data roaming, sirens should have sounded alerting the user that the device is now operating in a mode contrary to the user's financial expectations.
I'm sure it has an alert when it's battery needs recharging. No such luck when it starts draining your bank account.
The problem with hospital equipment is that the sensors often use very low voltages and act like antennas. Cell phones put out almost a watt of power. Just 1,000,000/th of that can overwhelm a machine that's supposed to be reading your heart.
How many people has the iPhone killed when it was supposed to be off?
Why on earth would three "businessmen" bother to take their iPhones abroad but switched off? These are expensive gadgets, and if I wasn't planning to use my iPhone on my trip to Tangiers I would simply leave it and its charger at home.
I've seen a lot of people talking about airplane mode or how to turn the phone off, but how about if you just want to leave the phone on to receive emergency phone calls, but not rack up huge data charges? What's the accepted method of doing that?
Yea, but they're all mac users so they will never admit to it.
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
Yeah, so you can carry an iBrick with you on vacation? Maybe they want to use their iPhone for mobile web surfing while connected to WiFi, using the digital camera feature, or just listening to music? Why shouldn't they be able tell the phone-third of the iPhone to shut down while keeping the rest of their features up? Convergence shouldn't have to suck...
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
The problem was that their three Iphones were racking up a bill for data charges using foreign phone charges. The Iphone regularly updates e-mail, even while it's off, so that all the messages will be available when the user turns it on.
This is bullshit.
It doesn't sound like the unit was powered off. It sounds like the screen was off, and like my old RAZR, the unit will continue to operate in the background while the screen is off. Stupid, lazy consumer didn't bother reading the manual, which clearly discusses how to POWER THE PHONE OFF COMPLETELY and WHAT AIRPLANE MODE IS, which accomplishes the same task this guy required.
Seriously, who the fuck thinks a phone is "off" just because the screen isn't lit up? This is 2007, right? The age of the cell phone cowboy.
There's no flaw here. The vast, vast majority of iPhone users are satisfied that it will happily do its thing while the screen is off, in your pocket. Otherwise, I couldn't be notified of mail whenever I got it.
Next time, if you spend $600 on something, read the motherfucking manual. Apple goes out of their way to write clear, simple manuals for the very reason that people don't want to have to be computer scientists to understand them. Sucks to be you, dude.
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
No, people just have to learn the difference between "sleep" and "a kind of sleep which isn't actually sleep because the phone is actively using the wireless connection without you realizing it".
My phone, a treo, functions basically the same and like basically every phone with a "standby" mode -- when you hit the power button, it turns off, but as the anonying blinky light indicates the cell phone function is still active, meaning it's communicating with the base station. It will receive incoming calls, and receive other updates from the network. However what it doesn't do is automatically make phone calls, or activate GPRS and start downloading crap off the internet, or otherwise doing anything that will cost me money.
That is what is broken about this. Not the difference between "off with wireless enabled" and "really off". It's the difference between "wireless enabled but not used" and "wireless enabled and being used with no consideration of where you are and how much it's going to cost you". It's the difference between merely being connected to the cell network, and using the cell network in ways that result in charges.
It sounds like a matter of defaults. Setting up the phone to by default automatically download emails is a bad decision, because it causes the phone to work contrary to how most people expect -- which is that in standby mode, you aren't accruing data transfer charges.
The enemies of Democracy are
Isn't this whole "off" vs "sleep mode" thing missing the point. From the POV of the average user, if he isn't making calls, receiving calls, reading email, sending email, etc... if *he* isn't using the phone, should he really expect a bill of $4,800?! Most people don't know about whether their phone is connected via WiFi or via the tower. From their perspective, if they aren't using it, they shouldn't be charged for it.
This is the sort of thing an average user would notice a $3-$4 charge for on their bill and call the company and then get the explanation. But to suddenly get hit with a $4,800 bill is simply ridiculous...
- Sleep/Wake vs. Power Off for iPhone
- 300 page phone bill
These issues are really more interesting than they seem on the surface, not merely as iPhone/AT&T/Apple screw-ups (which they admittedly are) but as a really curious class of screw-ups: growing pains. iPhone is causing AT&T some pain because it's bringing a whole bunch of new users to their expensive cell network services who actually use the service, not merely pay for having the service available for rare occasions where the need is so high it overcomes the pain in the ass factor. Sure, there were a handful of geek Treo users who checked email and surfed web pages every day, but they probably turned their paper-bills off after the first big one and moved on, problem "solved" for them because they really were gadget geeks.People have been using their iPhone for weeks without realizing that there is a difference between sleep/wake and power-off. That's really pretty interesting. iPhone is not different from other devices in maintaining this distinction, PalmOS devices have it, for example. However, with a Palm OS device one learns pretty quickly about the difference because they lock up and you gotta reboot 'em. Even people who have owned an iPhone since June 29 may never have had to power cycle their iPhone, and may not realize that the little Sleep/Wake button is not a "Power Off" button. It would be pretty hard to own a PalmOS device for eight or nine weeks without learning that distinction. Probably nobody at Apple thought of that, because they are all geeks and they are intimately familiar with the intended behavior of the device (e.g. how to turn it off when roaming) so they never saw this happen.
The really interesting part is that nobody at AT&T realized this would happen to people, because it probably doesn't happen to other people using other devices. Why not? Well, it certainly isn't because they don't have devices that automatically fetch IMAP or POP email. It's because they were trained by other quirks of the device to learn the difference between OFF and Sleep right away. This "trained" the users to overcome deficiencies in the AT&T billing process (and policies, really). It shouldn't cost that much to use your iPhone anywhere in the world at this point. Those rates are "rape and pillage" rates and phone companies will need to fix that by coming up with more reasonable roaming policies and prices.
It's interesting that none of the trade press analysts like that keen John C. Dvorak dude haven't stopped to ponder why nobody else in the history of AT&T customer smart phone users ever got a 300 page phone bill. The billing system was the same, iPhone users were just a type of customer with a type of device in the system.
As with the sleep/wake issue, again here nobody at AT&T realized this would happen because users of other smart phone devices are clearly not using them the way iPhone users use the iPhone. iPhone users caught AT&T by surprise because they are clearly surfing the web more often than users of other smart phones, as evidenced by the scale of the paper bill problem. This difference will probably start showing up in the web browser usage statistics within a few months once there are a couple million iPhone users, enough to compare to other platforms. The stats will reveal undeniably different usage patterns, as though it were not a pain in the ass and they could actually read the web pages they fetched.
Suddenly AT&T has a million ordinary non-geek users surfing the web on their phone every day (including google maps). That's what broke their billing system. The sleep/wake issue is just like that. A million smartphone users who haven't had to power cycle their device in two months so they don't even realize that sleep mode isn't "off". It hasn't happened before, apparently.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Well that's not easy when "sleep" is deliberately designed to appear as "off". Is it clear when you "sleep" it that it might be accruing charges? Having to read a fucking manual to find that out is UNACCEPTABLE. What crappy product design.
You can actually turn an iPhone off. These people left their iPhones on standby and thought they were turned off. Just because the screen is black doesn't mean the device is off.
That's not the problem. Standby vs truly off should not matter other than 1) battery life and 2) receiving network updates and the delay to reconnect to the network when you decide you need to use the phone function. Standby should not result in $4,800 worth of charges, and I say that knowing full well the difference between standby and off. I'd be pissed as hell if I found out my phone was racking up data charges "on my behalf".
THIS is the problem:
"The iPhone regularly updates e-mail, even while it's off, so that all the messages will be available when the user turns it on."
Making that the default behavior is a stupid decision, and it's one that is even as we speak costing customers money when they may not be realizing it. Automatically using the data connection without regard to the cell phone plan is completely stupid. Does it know the difference between peak and off-peak hours? Does it know what the customer's monthly data quota is? It apparently doesn't know when the customer is in international roaming!
Having that default behavior may have been sensible if Apple knew that the only plans that would work with an iPhone were 100% global unlimited plans. Then they could assume it's okay to download things whenever it feels like. But with the reality of cell phone plans? No way. That's retarded. And it is not these peoples' fault that they didn't expect their phone to work that way.
The enemies of Democracy are
You could have had a +5 funny if only you had said "up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start"
Yes, I think lots of devices in hospitals go through very long design cycles. There undoubtedly many devices in hospitals today which suffer from design assumptions that are no longer true (e.g. people now carry transmitting radios with them everywhere). I'm aware that it's a problem, I simply suggest that the right place to fix the problem is in the device design with proper shielding. Relying on the millions of worried people to remember when they can and can't use their device, and relying on them to know how to turn it off when they have other things weighing heavily on their minds is a poor strategy which can only fail, over and over and over.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
When you shut your phone, does it turn off? Or when you stop using a candybar, doesn't the screen go off? Yet the phone is not off. People know they have to press something to really turn "off" a phone, as per every other phone ever made.
After all, how is a phone supposed to receive calls if it's really off? There needs to be a difference between a sleep mode and off, and this is obvious on the iPhone.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I agree with the comments further down that this is a user-error. But I also think that there is a usability-issue on part of Apple here.
In the home network, there's free data, as I understand, and the roaming charges are high. I have cheap data in my home network, and expensive when roaming abroad. So when I step out of a plane and turn on my phone, I get a nice warning: "You're not in your homenetwork. MMS reception is off". MMS reception is the only automatic data-service on the phone.
Look in the configuration, surely enough: "MMS reception: Automatic (only home network) / Manual / Always".
It would make pretty good sense to add a similar option for the automatic email checking.
An unlimited open credit line is the other major problem here. I refuse to open an unlimited credit line just for a phone.
t
The iPhone is a phone. How complicated should one expect phones to be? How expensive should a simple mistake cost? Is it really unimaginable for someone to look at the black screen of the iPhone and think it's "off"?
Here is where you outlined how a user should handle the phones power management (emphasis mine):
You don't see problems with any of this?
First off, you have people reading manuals for phones. Yes I know, RTFM, etc. Really, you need to get over that. People don't read manuals for common items. Moreover, who has the time? You would not want to live in the world where you were forced to read the manual for every device, tool, or piece of software for every new function you envisioned using. That would be a major pain in the ass. I am 100% certain that you have used some piece of technology without reading 100% of the documentation. Not to mention you listed it as page 14 of the manual. 14 pages doesn't sound like much, but it is when I just want to turn off a phone.
Then you go on to list 4 power management functions, which does not appear exhaustive. So we have 4+ ways of "almost but probably not" turning a phone off. That seems clear as day.
Finally, you point out that it is called a "sleep/wake" button and neither an "on/off" nor "power" button. With that sentence you are implying the users are dumb for thinking that button should turn off the phone. However, 2 statements above it you are telling people how to turn off the phone with that same button. So are the users dumb for thinking a power-esque button should manage the power settings including on/off? Or are you dumb for thinking users are dumb for having assumptions that map back to what you just explained?
One final thought. You mentioned this pearl as well:
Yes, maybe he should have enabled "Airplane Mode" despite the obvious fact he was no where near a plane. I often think of applying modal techniques specifically labeled outside of those specifications. Brilliant!
What bothers me more is not that you blame this guy for a very makable mistake, but that somehow you think the costs associated with this "mistake" is justifiable. I'd better hear you say "It was my fault. I should have RTFM. I will wire the funds instantly!" when your next bill comes close to 50x your normal rate.
and avoiding the inevitably annoying conversation with an insufficiently knowledgable customer when the first month's bill arrives with huge data charges is the main reason cell companies like verizon won't let you activate a smartphone unless you also subscribe to some sort of data plan that doesn't charge you for every data transmission.
I just read the iPhone manual. Most mail requires you to set the "manual check/autcheck every 15/30/60 minutes" flag. Not too sure about Yahoo, which it states "If you have a Yahoo! email account, email is instantly transferred to iPhone as it arrives at the Yahoo! server." If the guy had a yahoo! account, it could be quite difficult to disable the email check feature. Either way, the guy had to set up the email on the machines. I thought the magic Itunes registration process configured the email.
I am a little surprised that you apparently can't disable the GSM/GPRS without also killing the WiFi. Were I on a foreign trip I might find it worthwhile to have my favorite WiFi enabled gizmo handy for websurfing in Starbucks and the like even when I didn't want to use plan minutes.
I've been on slashdot so long I'm starting to get out of touch with the cool stuff if it ain't on slashdot.
The default is in fact to check for mail manually - these people set it to automatically check mail. Of course the real problem here is the insane roaming charges for mobile data, which is no more costly than voice for the operators.
Yeah, someone else said that it wasn't the default behavior, which makes a lot of my argument moot.
And I agree completely that the ultimate blame lies with AT&T and the other cell providers and their crazy rate plans. Because even if the guy manually turned on automatic downloads, then forgot about it when he traveled abroad and left his phone in standby (which makes sense; if you want to use the phone you don't always want to have to wait to connect to the network first), I find it hard to believe that anyone would associate that behavior with a nearly $5k phone bill.
The enemies of Democracy are
Don't regular cellular phones have the same premise? One press for screen off, hold down for power off?
The *only* difference is that the iPhone has no visible indicator of being on when the screen is black.
Well, that and the fact that with the iPhone you can apparently be racking up thousands of dollars of charges while your phone is visually indistinguishable from being switched off. According to the source material cited, the only way you'd know that is if you read small print that runs to nearly 7,000 words, since the summary of the plan features doesn't indicate it.
However, these people didn't even try to turn their phones off. They simply set them down and assumed that a darkened screen meant it was off.
Where does it say that in TFA or any of the stories from other sources linked from it?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Yes, it does require a button to be held. But on my phone, if it's on, you can clearly see this from the time display on the LCD and the "on" light flashing every couple of seconds, and when you turn it off, you get a clear indication both audibly and from the screens and lights going off.
The usability problem here isn't requiring the user to switch a phone off, it's the fact that there is apparently no way to distinguish whether the phone is currently off or just in stand-by mode, unless you do something that would bring it out of stand-by or someone happens to call you. That and the fact that this phone's "stand-by" mode isn't really standing by at all, because it's doing very significant, very expensive things in the background.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The other mobile devices use a style of email called Push. The Internet protocols, including IMAP and POP3, are a different style called Pull.
Pull is not necessarily a bad thing, provided that it is used as intended. Pull has some definite advantages. The problem comes in when Pull is (ab)used to act like Push, by having the mobile device continuously poll. Even worse is to download content that the user never wanted downloaded. The whole point of IMAP is selective download with the user being part of the selection process.
Blackberry is a Push based process, and (unlike Internet) email it does not do huge content.
iPhone imitates the user experience of Blackberry's Push with Internet email, without any adjustment for the realities of mobile devices. That works only when you have lots of free bandwidth.
The IETF LEMONADE working group, mobile device manufacturers, and mobile phone service companies, have spent considerable effort at defining procedures for using IETF protocols with mobile devices. Critical to this is a mechanism called notification, which in effect is a Push that tells the mobile device to Pull. Done right, it combines the benefit of both strategies.
iPhone doesn't use any of that. Apple thinks that it knows better than anyone else.
I think that the phone should "know" that it is roaming and warn/deactivate stuff like email, or make an option for it to behave like that. I'd also like the ability to turn off the phone portion and leave the WiFi on. Now that theres been a public incident like this, I hope Apple adds these options.
As far as AT&T goes, I'm betting that they cut a deal with the guy, and he upgrades his plan instead of paying the cash. At least when I hear of cases like this, thats what the mobile carrier has usually done. I think that being able to rack up a $5k charge in the first place is pretty absurd. I can't think of any situation where that kind of a bill is acceptable, and they should really put limits too how high your bill can go.
The person in this article is guilty of not understanding how cell phones in general work and there is nothing to the story that the iPhone's allegedly poor UI is the culprit here. This is just more iFud spin that seems to be so popular with the insecure masses that can't stand the fact that Apple makes a lot of great products.
If you go to Ireland with your brand new Nokia E70 or Treo 650, and leave it on, charging, and set to automatically check email periodically, you're going to have the same fucking problem.
True, but there should be a setting for "only enable this feature while on AT&T network" so that the user would have to explicitly go into the options and enable certain features for roaming (knowing full well that it may incur extra charges...the menu should have a footnote or warning dialog to confirm when this setting is set). The iPhone could even come on with a dialog box when it is on roaming saying something to the effect of:
"The phone is scheduled to check e-mail but it cannot because the phone is currently roaming. What would you like to do?"
Then there could be a number of options ranging from "No, and don't ask me again (i.e. always no until I go into the options to turn it back on" to "Sure, go ahead and don't ask me again (i.e. I am a billionaire and I don't care how much they charge per megabyte here in Ireland...turn on everything for roaming)". It needs to be like firewall software, guiding the user through the options as situations come up and offering advice in a context relevant way. The problem with RTFM is that you are reading everything out of context and then trying to remember what to do when certain situations come up. Most people, engineers excluded, do not work or think that way.
Off may be really "Off", but if there's no way to tell if an iPhone is "Off" or "Sleeping" at first glance, then it's a UI design flaw.
There is, it's called pushing the Sleep/Wake button. Just like on my Sony Ericsson W810i, I have to push a key (any key) to see if it's on - when the display sleeps, its indistinguishable from being off. Of course, I know it's on, because I didn't turn it off! If this is a design flaw, practically every cell phone out there is flawed.
>I'd also like the ability to turn off the phone portion and leave the WiFi on.
me too, or an option to "limit data to WiFi only" That would be ideal for roaming situations since the default (and really only) behavior is that if an 802.11 connection is dropped it falls back to EDGE. That's great in an unlimited data area, it sucks when you are roaming
>
- MM
Since the iPhone is a converged phone, media player, picture viewer, etc... I can easily
see many people wanting to use the gadget out of the US for the other purposes without
expecting to run up a huge data bill. Otherwise, why would the poster have taken their iPhones with them, but not using them...
This is a serious hole in the procedures that needs to be highlighted far and wide before AT&T and Apple unreasonably extract megabucks.
-- Gary Goldberg KA3ZYW 301/249-6501 AIM:OgGreeb Digital Marketing Inc., Bowie, MD