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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. ""
Oh, dude's not alone. I'd much rather have hospital equipment designed such that it doesn't malfunction in the presence of a cell phone, than I would rely on the adroit and vigilant shepherding of electronic gadgets by worried family and friends who come to visit me in hospital. In this situation you fix the problem in the place where it's relatively easy to fix in a reliable way (i.e. by shielding the electronic gear from other signals at manufacturing time) rather in than in a zillion places (random heads of random unpredictable people) which are, every single one of them, prone to human error.
Since you seem so inclined, I suggest you instead thank the gods that these decisions are not up to you. The fact that other people make them might save your life one day.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
You can't take the battery out, but you can take the SIM card out. This way, you can use it for Wi-Fi and calendar, without the fear of being billed.
Well, I don't know how different AT&T's billing is from Verizon's but we have about 10-15 users on Treos that have their e-mail pushed down from Exchange to them and that surf the Internet. I've seen our bills and they're only a few pages. Every e-mail that comes to them (some get 50+ a day easily) goes to their phone, yet we still don't have endless bills. The bill for our entire company's set of cell phones, wireless data cards for laptops and regular phone lines combined adds up to the same number of pages that some of these people have been getting for ONE phone. I'd be interested to know why iPhone / AT&T chose to go the route they did. It's obviously related either to the way iPhone does data transfers, the way AT&T tracks them, or both.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
In fact, I'm even told that if your phone rings for an incoming call, that's enough for you to get roaming charges (even if you don't answer it). Supposedly you can avoid that by forwarding incoming calls directly to voicemail.
BTW, you don't want to roam internationally, at least, not without an expense account.
I remember one year I took a week's vacation in Ireland, and took my GSM phone with me. One day I was walking back to the hotel and the phone rang -- one of our customers was calling me directly, rather than use our central tech support line. It's bad enough to take direct customer calls on your personal cell phone (because the customer hasn't updated their contact info). It's even worse when that happens while you're roaming internationally.
The upshot is that I answered reflexively, before I realized what the call was going to cost. I hung up immediately as soon as I made that realization--the call must have been less than a second or two. That was still good enough to bill for a complete call, rounded up to a minute of airtime.
That second or two of airtime cost me $3.00 on my bill.
No, they didn't buy me dinner first.