Slashdot Mirror
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?
That's the *in-plan* rate. And, that probably only covers the first 20MB anyhow. Read the linked article (not the inquirer, the original), and it mentions that data rates can be as high as $20/MB in some countries, and that one data session was over $200 (10MBish? Seems reasonable for some attachments).
I hate sigs...
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)
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.
For the same reason that someone who signs a contract without reading it and/or insisting on changes, deserves to be screwed.
Just out of interest, how long do you think it would take the average person to read in full, understand, and if necessary seek legal advice on every binding agreement they enter into during their lifetime?
There is a reason that legal systems recognise concepts like unequal bargaining power, contracts of adhesion, and unconscionable terms: they do it because if the legal system took the same naive view that you propose, the world would grind to a halt.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
- 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.
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
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 *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.