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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.
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
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
You are kidding, right? This is absolutely no user error. It should be safe to assume that turning the thing off implies radio off.
Well perhaps they should call Airplane Mode, "radio off/disable radio" mode. Because normal people might not realize what Airplane mode does and only think of using it on an airplane.
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)
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.
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?
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
Do you automatically communicate with others when you are 'sleeping'?
Then why should an iPhone?
- 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.
You could have had a +5 funny if only you had said "up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start"
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.
I'm sorry but this is pure bs. Why would someone think because the screen is off and the device is sleeping that the device is off? My tiny brain would bring up the following points to alert me that the device is still actually on:
1) Device returns instantaneously when pressing the WAKE button
2) Carrier already attached at full when pressing the WAKE button
3) The ability to recieve phone calls while the device is sleeping.
Those might be some hints that "hey, just because the screen is off, it's still on." And I suppose you could also add to the list that standby eats up battery because the transmitters are on. I don't buy the ignorance excuse. To rack up charges that large, you'd have to on one mighty long cruise and if that were the case, the fact that you have to charge your iPhone that's been "off" every couple days might be a clue.
Further bunk in this article:
1) Calls the device "off", actually sleeping. Most other Smartphones have the same way of sleeping, only they have LEDs. Maybe that will be in rev B.
2) Says automatically checks email. It can be configured to do so, but it doesn't otherwise. I've heard of people complaining that the iPhone grabs other data while sleeping, I've never experienced this. Only mail when configured to do so.
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
An unlimited open credit line is the other major problem here. I refuse to open an unlimited credit line just for a phone.
t
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 *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.
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.