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. ""

Comments

Off means off

[Alex777]

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?

Re:Off means off

[Mr. Underbridge]

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?

I'd say hospital equipment shouldn't malfunction when presented with interference on a widely used spectrum, but that's just me.

Re:Off means off

[Kazymyr]

Better yet, how about airplanes? If it's not really off at any time, isn't it illegal to take an iphone on a flight?

Re:Off means off

[cnettel]

That's easy for many things, but not so easy when you are doing non-invasive monitoring of electric signals from the body. A false alarm would still cause problems, and I can understand why you want that type of equipment to be sensitive to the limit that it can detect spurious signals.

Re:Off means off

[Ichelo]

http://www.newsday.com/business/ny-bzappl0908,0,29 29341.story?coll=ny_home_rail_headlines

Levy said he didn't expect data transfer charges internationally because he believed the data network in Europe wasn't compatible with the iPhone. The Levys brought their phones with them for voice calls

I know the article says they were off, but it also says the took the phones for voice calls, so where they really off? or did they just not use the data part?

Re:Off means off

[Rycross]

There is an airplane mode switch in the settings.

Re:Off means off

[gardyloo]

Well, hospital equipment already racks up astounding charges. Maybe hospitals should start buying iDefibs and iProctoscopes. Sounds like iPhone owners will probably need both of those soon.

Re:Off means off

[skeeto]

I'd say hospital equipment shouldn't malfunction when presented with interference on a widely used spectrum, but that's just me.

Remember that intensity decreases proportionally to the inverse square. This means that after a not-so-far distance (such as the parking lot at the hospital), the intensity of the cell phone radiation decreases dramatically but will be very strong at close distances, such as in a waiting room at the hospital.

Ever hold a cell phone (not all do this) near a speaker and get blasted by loud buzzing noises? Notice that the speaker is fine when you move the cell phone away, say, 5 feet.

Re:Off means off

[aug24]

...and that's why it should be done in a shielded room, not why every other device on the planet should be off/shielded. What happens if someone walks by outside the window with an unshielded device?

(I had friends at uni who got interference from cars 200m away. They ran their experiment at 3am instead. My point being, there is always interference. You shouldn't try to legislate against it.)

J.

Re:Off means off

[fredmosby]

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.

To turn it off all you have to do is hold down the standby button for a few seconds then then hit the off button when it asks you if you really want to turn the phone off.

Re:Off means off

[jrumney]

The user here is an idiot and deserves what he gets.

Really? So you think that $4800 is perfectly reasonable for taking your phone abroad for a month with the default settings as supplied by the phone company, and not actually using it at all?

Re:Off means off

[phoenixwade]

2. Even if it was well-shielded, you'd have the airline problem. Which airline problem would that be? You aren't suggesting that cell phones cause a problem with an Airplane, are you?

My .02: There is no possible way that everyone will always remember to turn off a cell phone. The chances that a bit of equipment in a hospital will be exposed to cellphone signals approaches 100% unless the equipment in question is unusually isolated from the public (Surgery maybe?) This has been true for over ten years.
  So yes, I expect life-saving equipment to ignore and reject cellular signals, just like I expect the equipment to handle any other exposure to which it would commonly be subjected, Like electrical surge, static discharges (to the case, obviously), elevated Oxygen levels, and fluid splashes.

Re:Off means off

[Anonymous Coward]

apple fanboys unite - the only product where off does not mean off. Good thing apple does not make weapons, the iGun with the 'safety' that does not actually do anything.

Re:Off means off

[jonpublic]

That requires you to actually turn off the phone. Apparently these people bought the phone and never bothered to read the instructions on how to power down the phone.

Seriously? Did these people think that when the screen is off the phone is off? If that was the case then the phone must power on whenever they got a call, because the screen is always off.

Re:Off means off

[itsdapead]

This is why things should actually be OFF when you turn them off.

Er, what if its a PHONE and if you turn it completely off people won't be able to, like, PHONE you...?

If you read on, someone posts that the iPhone (just like Windows Mobile phones) has a power-down mode if you really want it.

What other phones DON'T do is periodically phone home all by themselves - and unless AT&T/Apple have a large friendly warning* in TFM then they're probably in the wrong on that one.

(* Do not eat iPhone. Do not operate iPhone while attempting to defuse atomic bomb. Do not drop iPhone onto the head of a pedestrian from the observation deck of the Empire State Building. Do not smash iPhone to pieces and stab yourself with the shards. Do not insert iPhone anally unless you are the goatse guy. If you are the goatse guy please do not return iPhone to Apple afterwards. Do not select The Lumberjack Song as ringtone while drinking in a bar in rural Canada. Turn iPhone off properly when traveling abroad. Do not take the name of Jobs in vain. Warning: this booklet may cause paper cuts if mishandled. See page 199 for more warnings)

Re:Off means off

[phoenixwade]

For how much of every hospital do you want to require shielding? Each intensive care ward and operating room has one or more heart monitors. Shielding still doesn't solve the problem. If a whole floor is an intensive care unit, even if it's shielded everyone on that floor with a cell phone is potentially interfering. I agree, shielding the FLOOR or the Building won't, ever, fix this. It has to be fixed where the failure is, i.e. the equipment that will fail.

Re:Off means off

[ktappe]

Medical equipment manufacturers have a lot of things to worry about already. They have tons of hoops to jump through to make sure that it never endangers people under normal operating conditions.

Cell phone signals have become "normal operating conditions" in our society.

Re:Off means off

[Gordonjcp]

You aren't suggesting that cell phones cause a problem with an Airplane, are you?

No, a mobile phone being operated in an aircraft causes problems with the mobile phone network. From that distance you have a massive radio footprint, and your phone appears in many many cells all at once (normally you're not in more than half-a-dozen cells, all adjacent), and roaming at a couple of hundred miles per hour when you're close enough to the ground to only hit the "normal" number of cells. The computers controlling the network routing cack themselves, and the network locks up. A couple of weeks later you get a snotty letter from Orange telling you not to do it again. See if you can guess how I know.

Re:Off means off

[RMH101]

...and to hell with those pesky laws of physics!

Say you have an ECG machine. It's hooked up via sticky contact pads to your chest and is measuring the delicate flickerings of life in your body. It's doing this because it's trying to spot the *tiny* irregularities that could indicate Bad Things.
You can't magically design a machine that's picking up miniscule electrical currents like this and have it unaffected when some idiot brings in a portable radio transceiver and cranks it up nearby while they tell their wife what they want for dinner.
As I type, I'm within 30 feet of a ward full of such machines, and maybe a couple of hundred yards from the EEG devices that measure the brain's electrical activity. As we're testing today, I can wave my phone around and I can watch the interference it causes on the data being captured. Even when I'm not talking on the phone, it's checking in with the nearest base station periodically, and I can see that screwing the traces too. It's not causing those machines to break: but it's fvcking up the data that they're capturing - and that data is being captured as it's for diagnostic purposes. Screwing this up could have really bad consequences for someone.

This is not rocket science.

Re:Off means off

[apparently]

Just because the screen is black doesn't mean the device is off.

and that's totally acceptable. A user shouldn't be able to just glance at their phone to determine if it's off, or if it's "sleeping", but not sleeping so soundly that it won't rack up a $4800 bill.
Defective by design, my friend.

Re:Off means off

[neapolitan]

> I'd say hospital equipment shouldn't malfunction when presented with interference on a widely used spectrum, but that's just me.

I'm a cardiologist - we get this question a lot, and I've been in many, um, discussions, about this issue.

In general, hospital equipment does not malfunction with any FCC approved wireless interference, especially from a consumer device. The trouble is, there are some anecdotes:

http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0196064405007110

that demonstrate equipment malfunction with close proximity of cellphones / radios, etc. This 2005 report was widely publicized, (sorry, system demands that you purchase the article if you want to read it) but it was a cellphone left on top an IV infusion pump that apparently malfunctioned, and was reproducible (move the phone near the pump -> malfunction, move it away and returns to normal.)

I tell people that as long as they have a digital phone, they are ok to use it in the hospital. In truth, I think that if a nurse tells you to move to another area they are probably wanting you to stop yapping in common areas, which is a much bigger problem IMHO.

As with anything that deals with life or death, physicians and health care staff are quite risk averse. If there is a very, very small chance of interference, then we err on the side of caution. Your cellphone is designed to not interfere with things, but I'm sure we have all heard our computer speakers chatter *before* a call comes in, or seen your old CRT monitor jump due to an incoming call on a nearby phone. This is interference -- making all medical equipment so that they are totally oblivious to all outside fields would make them inconceivably heavy. Don't bother with the "faraday cage" argument -- most cases are metal, but as anybody with engineering experience would tell you it is imperfect (as I've stated before, you can use your cellphone in a metal plane, also a "faraday cage.")

So, no, hospital equipment is generally ok, but generally we tell people to not use cellphones in the intensive care unit or operating rooms, where things are most sensitive and potentially could have lethal consequences. We allow answering the phone and moving to an appropriate area, and allow cellphone use throughout the hospital otherwise (the doctors do this too). If it were a big risk, equipment would be malfunctioning left and right. However, it is prudent to minimize risks, especially for nonessential communication, hence the policies.

Re:Off means off

[NinjaTariq]

Digital phones don't interfere with hospital equipment, how do you think doctors pagers work, the force?

The policy was introduced way back when they had analogue phones, because they may have done (not too sure, but thats what i heard), but they keep it because phones are just annoying. I have used my phone in an ICU with the permission of consultants and nurses without a problem, the operating theatre was next door.

I am pretty sure the same applies for aircraft too, but you can't normally get signal at 30k feet anyway so why bother, and you might miss annoucements if you are on the phone during takeoff and landing.

Re:Off means off

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

User interface design 101: a UI should be intuitive for users and not contain surprises.

Strange, Apple's UI people are usually pretty good. But if you really can have a phone that looks like it's switched off but isn't, and it really does require a counter-intuitive and confusing alternative action by the user to switch it off fully, then they dropped the ball big time on this one and the user is quite right to feel aggrieved at the small fortune in costs he has personally incurred as a result.

Re:Off means off

[petermgreen]

You really don't want to put each patient in a shielding box as doing so would interfere with treating them.

The problem is not that electronic circuits need shielding. The problem is sensors, to use an analogy putting on earmuffs will not allow you to hear a whisper in a rock concert.

Re:Off means off

[Rycross]

The default setting is for the iPhone to not check mail automatically. You have to explicitly turn that on.

Re:Off means off

[gEvil (beta)]

My phone has a display that goes into "sleep" mode after about 15 seconds. As far as anyone is concerned, the phone looks like it's off. In order to actually turn the phone off, I have to hold the power button for 5 seconds. Every single cell phone I've ever used behaves like this. From the sounds of things, the iPhone has similar behavior.

Re:Off means off

[servognome]

Non-compliance with the crew of an airplane is a criminal offense. Punishable by maximum of 2 years in prison and fine of 50,000HKD (at least that's what it said on my flight)

Re:Off means off

[kevinadi]

Do not select The Lumberjack Song as ringtone while drinking in a bar in rural Canada.

But... he's a lumberjack, so he must be OK.

Re:Off means off

[CPE1704TKS]

Have you not seen how strong a cell phone's wireless signal is? I've had my cell phone near speakers that have been turned off and you can still hear a "click-click-click" sound on the speakers. Think about that for a second... how strong must the EM signal be to drive a current through speaker wires that have been turned off? I would say those are incredibly strong signals. It's not as easy as it seems to deal with something that emits such a strong signal at close proximity.

Re:Off means off

[MillionthMonkey]

I don't blame the guy at all. I had been thinking of getting an iphone but this episode makes it pretty clear that the iphone is best avoided. If I have to study a manual to avoid an unexpected bill for $4800, then no thanks. The device is not ready to sell. It shouldn't be on the market.

Re:Off means off

[B1]

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.

Re:Off means off

[Minwee]

It has to be fixed where the failure is, i.e. the equipment that will fail.

That would be the human heart. When you come up with a workable redesign that addresses the problems you have discovered, please let the rest of us know.

Re:Off means off

[aug24]

Example:

Your plan involves getting on a plane, telling everyone to turn off their phones, then trusting your life to their obedience.

My plan involves making sure that the plane won't fall out of the sky and kill everyone if someone forgets they have a phone in their bag.

Still think my plan is bad?

I say systems should be robust in themselves, not just trusting that all the other people have followed the spec.

J.

Re:Off means off

[sumdumass]

To what expense? Wouldn't it be easier and cheaper to just have the phone shut off completely then to retrofit every hospital and emergency center that might be using these machines with a EM mesh and maintain it?

Your already spending more for a heart attack then your parents probably paid for their house. Should it end up costing more then your house too? Well, we could just get public health and have to deal with waiting lists and such, increase the taxes of everyone to pay for this. Yea, that sounds more likely instead of saying that electronic devices that report as being off should really be off and then waiting 4 or 5 years to have the new devices rotated in replacing the old ones.

It is an interesting situation. In one hand, the doctors even need the stuff. In the other, well whatever.

Re:Off means off

[phoenixwade]

...and to hell with those pesky laws of physics!

Say you have an ECG machine. It's hooked up via sticky contact pads to your chest and is measuring the delicate flickerings of life in your body. It's doing this because it's trying to spot the *tiny* irregularities that could indicate Bad Things.
You can't magically design a machine that's picking up miniscule electrical currents like this and have it unaffected when some idiot brings in a portable radio transceiver and cranks it up nearby while they tell their wife what they want for dinner.
As I type, I'm within 30 feet of a ward full of such machines, and maybe a couple of hundred yards from the EEG devices that measure the brain's electrical activity. As we're testing today, I can wave my phone around and I can watch the interference it causes on the data being captured. Even when I'm not talking on the phone, it's checking in with the nearest base station periodically, and I can see that screwing the traces too. It's not causing those machines to break: but it's fvcking up the data that they're capturing - and that data is being captured as it's for diagnostic purposes. Screwing this up could have really bad consequences for someone.

This is not rocket science.

First, no it's not rocket science, and it's not magic. It's a problem in electrical engineering.

Second, I have a different definition of "broken" than you do. By my definition a machine is "broken" when it does not accomplish the task it is designed for. In this case, a machine that is designed for data acquisition is broken when it reports null or spurious results when connected to the patient. So, if a cell phone causes null or spurious results, then the cell phone breaks the machine.

Third, the reality is that the cell phone WILL be in the environment. Whether by intention or by accident, the phone will be there on a fairly regular basis. Ether someone will forget the ban, forget they have the phone, or both, or someone asserts their "Rights" to their cell phone (however bogus those rights might be) or simple is selfish enough to think their convenience supersedes any "rules" a hospital puts in place.

And Finally, There are manufacturers who have already engineered around the problem with ECG's. Since it has been done, then it obviously can be done. I can point out a multiple examples of equipment that functions correctly around cellphones, some even require them to operate, like this machine that uses a cellphone to transmit ECG data, but it's one of those situations where someone is talking out of their butt without thinking it through, your limited experience does not translate into an impossibility. If you thought it through, you'd have realized that there are a number of data collecting medical devices out there that are used outside of the hospital, in particular I'm thinking of ECGS carried by EMT's or Paramedics, and the built in ECGs that are a part of the ADF equipment (some of which actually have a cell phone included in the cabinet designed to dial 911 when powered on.) They will, most assuredly, be in high-cell phone use environments (for example, at an accident scene with a number of onlookers using their phones to document and talk about the accident, as rubberneckers are wont to do)

Basically, If your machines are broken, then you need to change manufacturers. You are, as you pointed out, unnecessarily risking lives. If your place of business is in the US, considering the current litigious environment in the US, as it applies to health care, in particular. You are begging for a huge wrongful death, malpractice type lawsuit.

I don't agree that this is the way it should be, but it IS the way things are.

Re:Off means off

[nelsonal]

Especially in the fall, elk like to talk, a ton. Txting Hi wnt 2 m8 is much easier than bugling all day and night (and you got shot at far less too).

Re:Off means off

[Anonymous Freak]

I don't know about you, but I'd much rather have a low-power 'sleep' state on my cell phone that is the default "off-like" state. After all, normally I would still want to be able to receive phone calls. If pressing the "sleep/wake" button (that's Apple's name for it in every manual and video,) would turn the phone completely off, I would be annoyed.

As mentioned, this is a problem that users didn't read the manual. "I'm going to travel overseas, so I think I'll just put my phone in 'sleep' mode because I didn't read the manual to find out that it isn't 'off'." Not to mention the fact that you can put it in "airplane" mode that turns off the radios, and still use it as a camera and iPod.

Re:Off means off

[neoform]

Does that option tell you that it's going to check even if the phone is "off"? (asking because i don't have an iphone)

Re:Off means off

[Rycross]

No, that would be ridiculous. When the phone is off, its *off*.

Now if your phone is in sleep mode (screen isn't active, but the phone can still receive calls), then it will receive emails. My perspective is that its fairly obvious that when you set the phone to poll for emails, it will do so even if the phone is not actively being used. Thats pretty much the entire point of setting it to poll for emails.

Plus, when you get an email, the phone will alert you that it has done so.

And yes, I agree that being able to rack up a $4800 bill passively is unacceptable.

Re:Off means off

[ZorinLynx]

It's not even that! The pricing structure shouldn't even ALLOW for a $4800 bill. What the heck?

Come on. There should be a cap on the bill, say, $500. After that it can be considered flat rate. Why does AT&T need to charge $4800 for this? Do people actually use this much data service abroad on a routine basis?

If anything, cut service when it gets to $500. Because at that point, something is obviously up. Especially if the customer has never had this high a bill before. Credit card companies do this sort of statistical scanning all the time to combat fraud.

-Z

Re:Off means off

[badasscat]

The bigger problem here involves insurance, not the devices themselves. Cell phones don't kill people in hospitals, or crash airplanes, or magically blow up at gas stations. But because we have a one-in-a-million chance of something happening, which under the worst of situations could hypothetically cause a death/crash/fire, we have insulting signs all over the place warning us to turn off the phone.

Apparently you missed this.

It's not nearly as rare as "one-in-a-million" - it's more like "one-in-one-point-two" (50 out of 61 cases tested), provided the network being used is GPRS-based. That's pretty damn significant. And these were life-threatening cases of interference, including ventilators being switched off and pacemakers running at the wrong rhythm.

Even if you're not using GPRS, it's not a hospital's job to go around testing different cell phone networks to see if they interfere with their equipment. Their job is to save lives, not test cell phone equipment. And to that end, I would certainly hope that they would require that all devices potentially able to disrupt hospital equipment to be switched off, regardless of whether or not you're "insulted" by the signs. Your personal feelings are not worth a hill of beans next to somebody's life.

Re:Off means off

[gardyloo]

I'm stuck paying $800-1300 per screw Hey, a girl's gotta make a living.

Re:Off means off

[mcrbids]

It's not even that! The pricing structure shouldn't even ALLOW for a $4800 bill. What the heck? ... Credit card companies do this sort of statistical scanning all the time to combat fraud.

The difference is... who pays? If a credit card is fraudulently used, the credit card company pays. So they have every incentive to give a damn.

But guess who's going to pay the $4,800? It sure as hell won't be AT&T. As I write this, my wife is on the phone to discuss a $900 Verizon bill my daughter rang up "saving money on the minutes" with text messaging. The only thing they seem willing to do is very politely tell us to screw off.

They are used to it.

Re:Off means off

[monopole]

I am a PhD in Physics and have designed closely related electromyographic (EMG) systems with bluetooth. I can tell you that yes it is a problem of basic physics. An EMG or ECG consists of a high impeadence amplifier which is built to pick up very small currents between electrodes. While the desired signal is the impulses within the muscles, the currents induced by an electromagnetic wave acting upon a conductor (including sweaty skin) will generate a stronger signal. Getting EMGs to work under any conditions is a flaming b**ch on wheels, even in the presence of simple things such as mains currents. When you toss in RFI things get much worse especially if some component of the system is acting as a rectifier. You can shield the circuit and filter the signal but RFI/EMI is going to play hell with the system in the best of circumstances.

By my definition a machine is "broken" when it does not accomplish the task it is designed for. Very nice, but in the real world everything has limitations and tradeoffs and outside of the brains of PHBs you gotta stick to the cold equations, and not the fantasy of arbitrary semantic definitions.

So

[niceone]

When you go out of the country, just yank the battery out.

Oh, wait...

Re:So

[GeckoX]

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.

Re:So

[Carbonite]

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.

Re:So

[Dunbal]

Every other phone I have EVER seen is actually OFF when you turn it OFF.

      I've got news for you...

Re:So

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoa here -- you are off base. The phone wasn't "off" any more than a closed clamshell is "off". You can turn an iPhone off, and then it is actually off.

Re:So

[pherthyl]

Or blend it..

Re:So

[ak3ldama]

***How the hell is an END USER supposed to jump to the conclusion that OFF doesn't mean OFF.*** You, sir, have permission to design consumer devices. A lot of other people posting to this thread seem to have flunked this snap quiz in User Interface Desgin 1A.

Yea, but they're all mac users so they will never admit to it.

Re:So

[nine-times]

Except that, evidently, he didn't turn it off. He just figured that "black screen" meant "off". Also, I kind of wonder about this on the grounds that the iPhone doesn't carry a very large charge. Assuming he left it in standby, didn't do anything, and it checked for e-mail, it would carry the charge for about 2 days. Now, the most the iPhone will check e-mail is every 15 minutes, which means 96 times a day, which means 192 times in 2 days. Assuming he started with a completely full charge, the most the phones would have connected is about 200 times each.

So are 600 quick data connections to download e-mail $4800? An average of $24 per connection? 12 connections per page? Seems like a lot. I wonder if these people possibly might have been charging their cell-phones over the course of the trip and had them on for longer. If they really thought that their phones were off, why would they be charging them?

The law needs to clarify things like this

[MikeRT]

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.

Re:The law needs to clarify things like this

[CaptainPatent]

This was exactly the first thing I thought. I doubt there is a way they are legally liable for such charges when they occurred without the user's knowledge or interaction. The only way they can be charged is if somewhere it was stated that this can/would happen if they took the phones out of country and network range.

Re:The law needs to clarify things like this

[kevinadi]

The TFA said it all: Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris points out in its terms and conditions that it will cost an arm an a leg to use an Iphone out of the US even if no services are intentionally used.

IANAL, but the customer is most likely out of luck if he tries to challenge this. After all, this is in the terms & conditions that he supposedly agreed upon.

This is another major blow to iPhone, on top of the recent price cut. Now we have an Apple spokeswoman admitting freely that the simple act of bringing it out of the country without using it actually cost "and arm and a leg". I have to point the blame to ATT for greed and Apple for letting this happen. How much more can you rip off from your early adopters (which are presumably loyal Apple customers)?

Re:The law needs to clarify things like this

[sholden]

So I can charge Westinghouse for the electricity used by the TV they made, since when I press the "off" button on the remote is goes into a standby mode?

I mean who would have thunk that the button the iphone manual labels "Sleep/Wake button" would actually put the device in "sleep" mode and not turn it off?

Re:The law needs to clarify things like this

[SolitaryMan]

For the same reason that someone who signs a contract without reading it and/or insisting on changes, deserves to be screwed. It's called a manual, it comes with the device, and you are allowed to read it. There is no "deception", only ignorance on the part of the user.

Yeah, exactly

Re:The law needs to clarify things like this

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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.

Re:The law needs to clarify things like this

[Hatta]

If the "OFF" button doesn't turn it OFF, there is deception involved.

Re:The law needs to clarify things like this

[ajs]

For the same reason that someone who signs a contract without reading it and/or insisting on changes, deserves to be screwed. It's called a manual, it comes with the device, and you are allowed to read it. There is no "deception", only ignorance on the part of the user. This won't hold up in court, and for good reason. The customer had a reasonable expectation that turning the device "off" would prevent it from performing any transactions that would cost money. There was, at no point, a warning displayed (because the device was "off") that charges were being accumulated. There's simply no interaction here that would suggest to a typical user "read the manual before operating the off button, or get charged extra money."

To make it clearer, re-cast your argument in terms of someone being charged nearly $5000 because the "enter" key on their new computer's keyboard was specially interpreted by the pre-installed operating system as a signal to accept a customer service fee for requesting email-based help on the current application. There's simply no way that would fly in court, no matter what the manual said.

Re:The law needs to clarify things like this

[_14k4]

I am fully aware that wireless turns off the radio, and that the thing operates through radio waves. However, why call it a phone when wireless is off; it is, essentially, a brick wrapped in plastic when wireless is off. Yes, you can play brickbreaker (no pun intended) and write things to be sent later...

But the person who had the device before me couldn't see how wireless and "phone" were so interconnected; thinking "wireless" meant Internet related functions and "phone" meant... well, ring ring related functions...

Requisite tag for this article: iphOWNED

[jimstapleton]

I think that covers the situation nicely.

Soo..

[Kazymyr]

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?

Re:Soo..

[MaestroRC]

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).

Re:Soo..

[devnullkac]

He probably didn't have the international data plan; that's why he left the phones turned off.

Re:Soo..

[jimicus]

Actually if you have no plan for international data AT&T charges .0195 per KB

But is that $0.0195 or 0.0195 cents?

Re:Soo..

[InternetVoting]

If you don't register for the international data plan (which is optional with a mandatory 1 year contract) the rate is $0.02/KB which translates to about 235MB for $4800. This is not unheard of for three phones with a few big attachments.

Now all this talk about is it really "off," what the Apple iPhone user manual (which they obviously didn't read) calls "sleep" is nothing more than a screen lock. For this story to be true we would have to see a number of things. 1)As previously noted 235MB of email was downloaded. 2)The user was truly unaware of the difference between screen lock and off. 3)The user had all notifications turned off (audio or vibrate) for each of the 235MB worth of emails

At a minimum the story is disingenuous. The iPhone does not perform as described with off. The user would have found himself in a similar predicament with any other PDA he didn't turn off (AT&T offers the same international data plan for all phones)

Re:Soo..

[thegnu]

So you are saying the networks we got here in EU are untested running on non standard stuff?

No, I'm saying the Apple didn't test it on EU networks, possibly. Plus, billing is done differently by different companies. And if the way Apple and AT&T handled dropped connections (oh, data's free, it's not a problem) doesn't apply to EU networks, then they would possibly conflict. Also, if Apple and AT&T worked on a non-ubiquitous way of handling errors, then it would make sense (judging from its non-ubiquitousness) that not everyone would implement the same methodology.

Looky:

1. Newcomer to cell phone market makes a cell phone
2. Tons of people say it's hard making cell phones, that they have no faith in the newcomer
3. The newcomer does very well, and there are no problems
4. Woops, the newcomer just charged someone $4800 for no good reason

Also, didn't Apple say that one of the reasons to stick with network lockdown is to not have to support various networks?

How to make BIG BUCKS with your iPhone

[word munger]

1. Travel overseas and rack up huge iPhone bill
2. Submit your story to blogs, forums, and /.
3. ????
4. Profit
5. Pay your iPhone bill

Try turning it off instead of sleeping the display

[wal9001]

Sleep: Press sleep/wake button briefly. Off: Hold button for several seconds, slide red slider control that shows up. Of course it downloads new messages when the display is sleeping. There'd be no point to sleep if it didn't.

Gap in the market!

[adycarter]

So when the phones "off" it communicates, and you can't kill it all together by removing the battery?........

Coming soon to the iStore, the iCoffin, a lead lined box designed for when you need to take your phone out of the country, or near medical equipment.

Be the envy of the Intensive Care ward with your small and portable iCoffin weighing only 1 tonne, marvel at its lead casing, lick its tasty exterior and be a role model for Chinese toy makers everywhere!

Re:Gap in the market!

[Kazymyr]

That's actually a neat idea, but you don't need the lead (the thing's not radioactive to my knowledge). Let's see which gadget company will be the first one to sell Faraday's cages for iphones. Can you just imagine the ads? "Be absolutely protected from unwanted phone bills! Only with the iCase(TM)"

Re:Gap in the market!

[iphayd]

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.

Re:Gap in the market!

[Sancho]

I do, but I don't think that Apple did anything wrong in this case. Really, it's the price gouging that I have a problem with.

The only thing Apple really could have done was become more intrusive when the phone uses data. A Vista-like "Are you sure you want to check your mail?" every time would have prevented this. Doing so while roaming might even be a sane default.

But realistically, the default settings of the iPhone do not cause this behavior. This guy turned on background e-mail checking, then forgot or didn't know how to turn off his iPhone (which means that he didn't read the manual that came with it.) He holds the most culpabililty by far.

This had better get fixed

[phayes]

If Apple wants to sell more than a token number of iPhones to people outside the USA as it is planning to. Given that countries elsewhere are smaller, the likelihood that a user is not in their home country is much larger. If the iPhone cannot be taken outside your home country - even when off - what use is it?

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.

Re:This had better get fixed

[csnydermvpsoft]

My guess is that phone plans in those other countries (especially small, non-island ones) have much better roaming terms than US plans.

Re:This had better get fixed

[CronoCloud]

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.

Re:This had better get fixed

[Harik]

"the dumbass" probably wanted people to be able to reach him in an emergency, which is why he took a cellular phone with him. Turning it off/leaving it at home rather defeats the purpose, doesn't it?

I mean, call me crazy, but that's what I do with my phone while I'm out of the country, I just refrain from making calls on it unless they're important. Then again, I guess I'm "the dumbass" for expecting slashdot readers to have crawled out of their mother's basement and actually gotten out of the country themselves.

Re:There is no "Off" ?

[gad_zuki!]

>Then how is it legal to carry it on airplane or somewhere where it requires to operate in complete radio-off mode?

It has an airplaine wireless off mode. The problem is that the users who buy these things are too hip and smart and cool to spend 45 seconds with the manual. User error, nothing to see here.

Re:There is no "Off" ?

[Richthofen80]

The iPhone has a radio-off mode, where it disables its cellphone antennae and wifi antennae. Its called 'airplane mode' and accessible through the settings.

It also has a power-off, where it essentially turns off everything except the sensor to turn it back on again. Not too many people even know this exists, even if they own an iPhone. If you press and hold the lock button at the top right, a screen will appear that says 'slide to turn off'... this is the only way to reboot the iPhone, I think.

Most people press the 'sleep' hold button once, thinking that 'turns it off', but all it does is disable the screen. its still running, and using its antennae.

Thats called standby or sleep, not off.

[shidarin'ou]

When you push the button at the top once, it puts the phone to sleep. When you hold the "sleep" button down for 3 seconds, it actually turns off- totally off.

Maybe they should have done that- instead of wondering why their "off" phones were still "turning on" to ring.

Yikes

[y86]

Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris points out in its terms and conditions that it will cost an arm an a leg to use an Iphone out of the US even if no services are intentionally used.

I didn't realize organ trading was allowed in the US.

Re:Yikes

[Kredal]

It's not. That's why it costs an arm and a leg OUTSIDE the US.

Roaming Charges?

[tkrotchko]

Could be the ridiculous rates you get charged by operators in Europe.

Last year, a colleague and I were staying in London and he called our local travel office to make some changes to the flight. He was on the phone for 30 minutes (mostly on hold) and he was presented with a bill for $600 (300 pounds). Now, you tell me what the rate was...

Anyway, he just refused to pay it, and the manager eventually took it off. But still... seems like a lot of places are set up to cheat the unwary traveler.

Re:Roaming Charges?

[jimicus]

Was that a hotel or a mobile phone bill? Roaming charges were recently the subject of an EU court case which has placed a cap on them:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4851730.stm

http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities /roaming/roaming_regulation/index_en.htm

Though I can't see it helping much if you're using a US cell phone in the EU.

Re:Roaming Charges?

[vvpt]

The new EU roaming tariff only applies when using a sim from a operator located in the EU. The aim is to harmonize roaming costs within the EU. So it doesn't apply to an AT&T sim. http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/roaming/ Secondly, the tariff only applies to voice calls and NOT to SMS, MMS or GPRS/UMTS. Thirdly, I have noticed that people seem to get charged for absurd amounts of data. It is quite impossible to verify that those amounts have actually been used. I have a theory that the calculation method used by the operators is responsible for charging people for amounts that are bigger then the actual use. It would be interesting to measure the actual use (possibly through a tcpdump) and compare this with the bill. I haven't seen any operator that explains in detail which calculation method (using increments) is used.

boycott

[Skapare]

"boycottcingular.com" is now the new "boycottatt.com".

Re:boycott

[quantum bit]

AT&T: Your world, delivered. To the NSA.

Re:Uhhhh

[mir]

But the guy was on a cruise BOAT.

Re:There is no "Off" ?

[struppi]

User error, nothing to see here.

You are kidding, right? This is absolutely no user error. It should be safe to assume that turning the thing off implies radio off.

Re:Try turning it off instead of sleeping the disp

[arose]

It's so intuitive!

Re:ihpones

[evilgrug]

Hopefully "after this gets publicised" more people will bother to read the manual which clearly states in Chapter 2 "The Basics" (page 14) how to turn the iPod completely off.

Re:ihpones

[Anonymous Coward]

No, people just have to learn the difference between "sleep" and "power off".

Surfing the Med

[Somegeek]

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.

Re:Surfing the Med

[SCHecklerX]

So the question is (I don't have an iphone), is there an easy way to enable/disable the automatic email checking? This is the real problem.

It's Tinfoil Hat Time!

[OmniGeek]

1. Take large sheet of tinfoil
2. Wrap that sucker up like a ham-and-Limburger sandwich
3. Explain to the nice folks at the X-ray machine why that suspicious package is your iPhone
4. Be unable to get emergency calls from your family at home while on your Mediterranean cruise

Of course, there's always the simple, brute-force power-down solution: the iHammer. (Can you tell how unimpressed I am with this overpriced, overhyped gewgaw?)

Not the iPhone, but AT&T!

[Anonymous Coward]

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)

Re:There is no "Off" ?

[sholden]

It should be safe to assume that pressing the "sleep" doesn't turn it off, but puts it in whatever sleep mode is.

Re:Simple solution

[that IT girl]

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".

Airplane mode?

[YrWrstNtmr]

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.

Sleep/Wake Doesn't mean "Off"

[Gary W. Longsine]

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.

Re:Sleep/Wake Doesn't mean "Off"

[dattaway]

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?

Re:Sleep/Wake Doesn't mean "Off"

[clickety6]

You might find this article interesting then

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1659417,00.html

The relatively informal test found 43% of the medical equipment was affected to some degree by mobile phone signals...

Re:Sleep/Wake Doesn't mean "Off"

[Gary W. Longsine]

"How many people has the iPhone killed when it was supposed to be off?"

Why do you hate America?

Re:Sleep/Wake Doesn't mean "Off"

[Gary W. Longsine]

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.

User Error

[Oink]

I'm not sure I feel a lot of sympathy here. I mean, that is a *huge* bill, but the situation seems completely obvious. The iphone frigging buzzes to alert you that you have new mail. Did this guy think it was magic leprechauns that were delivering that information?

Also..

1) User is an idiot and doesn't know the difference between 'off' and 'standby.'
2) There is an 'update email manually' setting, which actually I *thought* was the default behavior, though I could be wrong on that count.

I have played with an iPhone in a store

[Junta]

It has a 'airplane mode' setting. Of course, it certainly isn't obvious to a normal person that an 'off' device could be expected to transmit.

Re:I have played with an iPhone in a store

[haystor]

An unlimited open credit line is the other major problem here. I refuse to open an unlimited credit line just for a phone.

and he brought it with him, because...

[toQDuj]

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.

Re:and he brought it with him, because...

[uglydog]

Maybe they brought the iPhones with them because the iPhone isn't just a phone. Maybe they wanted to listen to music, or look at pictures.

Now, the "switched off all the time" part... I got nothing on that.

Need "budget mode" for devices

[whyde]

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.

Re:Gotta remove the sim chip I guess

[Larry Lightbulb]

Usually I remove the sim and get a local pay-as-you-go sim so I can use the phone wherever I am.

Not the full story.

[Dzimas]

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.

Re:Not the full story.

[eck011219]

As has been pointed out elsewhere, the iPhone isn't just a phone. It's a PDA, mp3 player, and so on.

Moreover, when I travel I very often need to have a phone immediately upon arrival at home (whoever is picking me up usually has to wait at a staging area a few minutes away from baggage claim, so I have to call them and tell them to come on ahead).

"Airplane Mode" isn't a proper name for having all external signals turned off. On my Treo, you can turn off the phone portion very easily and still use the rest of the PDA. Sounds like the iPhone is far less intuitive.

Re:Normally, it doesn't.

[djh101010]

hospital equipment shouldn't malfunction when presented with interference on a widely used spectrum

Normally it doesn't. Most critical equipement is designed to be solid.


I work in the medical devices field and have done so most of the time since 1990. Systems are tested rigorously for both RF Emissions and RF Susceptibility.

*BUT* on the other hand, the designer didn't have the opportunity to run tests between their product and every fucking crazy stuff emitting radio-noise that a patient may try to subject it to.
Nothing unique about the iPhone in this regard - edge network has been around for many years.

Phone are forbidden to be on the safe side of things, not because all medical equipement is so sensitive that the whole hospital will crash if a GSM phone comes by.

Actually, the local hospitals around here (Wisconsin) have increasingly been taking down the signs about cellphones. Science can, sometimes, overcome folklore.

(And sometimes, there are suprising interactions, like the iPods' touchwheel interfering with pacemakers)
I haven't read about that, can you get me a link where I can see this? Knowing what I do both about pacemakers and iPod touchwheels, I find this quite surprising.

On the other hand, that doesn't prevent the iPhone from having a mode where it is actually off.
Of course it doesn't. There's "airplane mode" where all the RF sections of the iPhone are off, and there's also "off" which is of course different than the "I'm not using it right now and the screen is dark" mode. The only way their phones could have been fetching email while they were on vacation is this:

1. They configured the mail client for automatic updates (I think manual is the default)
2. They took 3 iPhones with them on vacation so they wouldn't use them (plausible?)
3. They put the iPhones into screen lock mode, rather than off or airplane mode.

It seems to me that being surprised that the device would do what you have configured it to do when you leave it turned on, is on par with being annoyed that your cellphone rings when you've already hung it up. If I could embed an image at this point, I'd pick one of the "You're doing it wrong" series.

Re:There is no "Off" ?

[CommanderData]

I don't know if there's anything we can do for her. I supplied her with earplugs to fight off the incessant sound of bagpipes, and a can of sheep-b-gone. I did my part... Anyway I'm enjoying the quiet time ;)

Still no real solution

[jschloer]

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?

Re:ihpones

[Junior J. Junior III]

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...

A reading from TFM...

[Americano]

I just came back from 2 weeks in Ireland. I used the phone in a pinch to try and find directions when I was semi-lost in Dublin. The rest of the time, I used the ipod features, and only checked my email when wifi was available in the hotel. Total international data rates for my iphone for the entire trip: Just under US $8.

I suspect Mr. Levy never bothered to RTFM on his device, and then left his phone(s) in the "sleep" mode (display off, radios on), for the duration of his cruise. From Page 14 of the iPhone User Guide:

To Lock iPhone -- Press the Sleep/Wake button.
To Unlock iPhone -- Press the Home button or the Sleep/Wake button, then drag the slider.
To Turn iPhone completely off -- Press and hold the Sleep/Wake button for a few seconds until the red slider appears, then drag the slider. When iPhone is off, incoming calls go straight to voicemail.
To Turn iPhone on -- Press and hold the Sleep/Wake button until the Apple logo appears.

Note that they call it a "Sleep/Wake button", not an "on/off" button, or a "power" button.

Other than that, he could have enabled "Airplane Mode", which does the following (User Guide, page 22):

When you turn on airplane mode, [a small airplane icon] appears in the status bar at the top of the screen. No cell phone, radio, Wi-Fi, or Bluetooth signals are emitted from iPhone. You cannot:

• Make phone calls
• Send or receive email
• Browse the Internet
• Send or receive text messages
• Stream YouTube videos
• Get stock quotes
• Get maps locations
• Get weather reports

If allowed by the aircraft operator and applicable laws and regulations, you can continue to use iPhone to:

• Listen to music and watch video
• Listen to visual voicemail
• Check your calendar
• Take or view pictures
• Hear alarms
• Use the stopwatch or timer
• Use the calculator
• Take notes
• Read text messages and email messages stored on iPhone

Oh, and you can also disable automatic checking of email in the iPhone settings. The default behavior is to check every so often, but you can set it to "Manual", which means you have to tell the iPhone to check email, it won't go out automatically and try downloading messages.

There's warnings about "Additional fees may apply" plastered all over the iPhone manual when discussing international roaming, as well. So to all the people crying that this just shows the iPhone is an overhyped piece of crap, or that this is evidence of some sort of collusion between Apple and AT&T to suck their customers dry, get over it. The guy didn't read his manual, and now he's learning that that was a costly mistake. 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.

Re:A reading from TFM...

[CodeBuster]

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.

Bullshit

[Mikey-San]

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.

Re:Bullshit

[Poorcku]

european carriers warn u when welcoming you on their network through an sms. this is 2007, europe, consumer friendly. cut the venom :) - if the guy did not get a welcoming sms, the phone was off - no standby, and if it was in standby and did not announced the sms, then Iphone has a serious issue. basta.

Re:There is no "Off" ?

[dintech]

Either way, it does seem to be contradictory to Apple's policy of being user friendly where possible.

Re:ihpones

[Chris Burke]

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.

Re:There is no "Off" ?

[fredklein]

Do you automatically communicate with others when you are 'sleeping'?

Then why should an iPhone?

AT&T Growing Pains

[Gary W. Longsine]

I suspect this problem is related in a curious way to the 300 page phone bill issue, in that it reveals billing-process (or, arguably, "user training") issues which are unintended consequences of the success of some of the design goals of the device. This may sound a bit odd, but let me explain.

1. Sleep/Wake vs. Power Off for iPhone
   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.
   
   
2. 300 page phone bill
   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.

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.

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.

Re:AT&T Growing Pains

[JCSoRocks]

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.

What? Why would they change their pricing? They just figured out a way to bilk people for more money when they aren't even using their phone! brilliant!

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.

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.

Re:AT&T Growing Pains

[nofx911]

Thats because Verizon is smart, and only sends the billing summary for each of the phones (the summary contains the breakout for each major category of charge, voice, data, sms, etc). You can then get access to log of every charge by going on-line, and selecting the phone.

Re:AT&T Growing Pains

[tha_mink]

I suspect this problem is related in a curious way to the 300 page phone bill issue, in that it reveals billing-process (or, arguably, "user training") issues which are unintended consequences of the success of some of the design goals of the device. This may sound a bit odd, but let me explain.
1. Sleep/Wake vs. Power Off for iPhone So, it's a feature? I leave my Blackberry on 24/7 and my phone bill is 3 pages long.

I can only imagine the bad press that would be in the air if this was a Microsoft phone instead of an Apple phone. But, since it's an Apple product, it's the user's fault for not knowing that turning their phones off isn't really turning their phones off.
As far as this bit...

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.
I've taken my Blackberry (From the good ole US of A) into Mexico and the BVI's, left it on and running, and had no extra charges for data. So...like...go Verizon.

Re:AT&T Growing Pains

[Gary W. Longsine]

There is no reason to believe that the Verizon billing system ever had this particular issue. However, if it did, its very likely that Verizon would have solved these problems a couple years ago when they started rolling our their EVDO network. At that time the early adopter EVDO customers were laptop users who did use the service to surf the web and send/receive email extensively. Of course, there is also no reason to suspect that the AT&T billing system had this issue.

Regarding bad press, I'd say there has been plenty of bad press about both of these iPhone issues. I was merely pondering why these issues only showed up with the iPhone, when in point of fact, AT&T have sold several million WIndows Mobile and other devices that, in theory, offer their users the same services. If those users had been, oh, routinely using the data access features to surf the web and so forth they would have seen 300 page bills and the problem would have been fixed ages ago. Clearly it wasn't. I find that interesting. I think we'll see a few more of these types of issues crop up as the iPhone population grows, but also as other new phones come on the market which make it easier for people to actually use these network services.

Re:AT&T Growing Pains

[kcarlin]

Of course, those of us using phones that get snarky about shutting down, like my Blackberry, usually can solve the problem by popping the battery. The "off" button on my 7130e is a sleep button that leaves the antenna powered and wakes automatically when there is a call. To save power overnight one has to turn off the antenna and then put the phone to sleep, or just pull the battery. On occasion, the antenna power down stalls and never completes. Failure to turn off the antenna results in a serious overnight drain on the battery many nights, so the battery being removable is an important feature to me.

Steve's insistence on non-removable batteries in the smaller electronics has kept me from considering those products. A multi-day denial of service to change batteries while Apple does the job for me and the inability to take spare batteries on the road or extend the life of an older battery as a spare is simply unacceptable.

As for the "new" AT&T, this is business as usual for them. I had a pager with Cellular One, which they transparently provisioned through SBC. Then, a couple of years later they stopped providing the pager service but didn't tell me until I brought the pager in to get it fixed because I wasn't getting my pages. They said that had to buy a new phone and sign a new, pricier contract if I wanted the features they'd dropped. So I passed and kept an eye out for a better deal. About two years after that, SBC started billing me for pager services that Cellular One, now Cingular, hadn't been providing me for quite awhile. When I called Cingular to get it straightened out, the supervisor I spoke to told me I was an idiot, in those words, for calling him and not SBC. I pointed out that it was Cingular that had lied to SBC while selling them closed accounts and he hung up. I had a new phone with a new provider 12 hours later, and will not be doing business with the "new" AT&T aka Cingular & SBC & the old AT&T & some others that I misplaced somewhere.

The phone was also useless outside the country because of roaming charges resembling college tuition bills, but I remembered 1990 when these same telcos sold 800 numbers for use as pay calling instead of free calling and the usual suspects circulated free prize announcements and other lures at the other end of 800 numbers that consumers expected would be toll free, and instead got stuck for the message fee "$1-10" per minute depending on the scam, as I recall. This continued long after the 900 series numbers for pay calls began.

So, Steve, to summarize, I need a removable battery and a phone company that knows its whatsits from a hole in the ground and hasn't made my list of pillage artists. Best of luck on that last one. Oh, and I'm watching whose security oddities verrrry closely as well and I don't care if a removeable battery costs me a little in thickness.

Re:ihpones

[Bieeanda]

Fourteen pages into a 120-page manual, for a simple, vital command. Jesus, even my iPod Shuffle came with a quick reference sheet the size of a playing card.

Re:iphones

[MillionthMonkey]

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.

Let me call bull on this one

[lelitsch]

I just came back from 2 weeks in Australia with my iPhone, and even having it on a couple of hours a day to surf or check email over wifi, I didn't rack up a single cent of roaming charges. The TFA leaves out two bits of information. For one, you have to specifically activate international roaming at AT&T's web site or an AT&T store for any AT&T phone to hook up to any network overseas. Secondly, unlike a Blackberry, the iPhone does not check email periodically, this was much criticized by many, even here on Slashdot. It's actually a bit of a pain even in the US, you have to turn on the phone AND go to mail to get updates. The only email that can be pushed is Yahoo email

Standby means no data transfer charges

[Chris Burke]

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.

Re:Standby means no data transfer charges

[IndieKid]

As stated elsewhere in the comments, it is configurable and the automatic e-mail check is off by default. These guys turned it on, went on holiday and forgot to turn it off, resulting in a big bill.

Seems like the real option that's needed is a 'don't make data calls on a foreign network' option.

Re:Try turning it off instead of sleeping the disp

[quantum bit]

You could have had a +5 funny if only you had said "up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start"

FUD, FUD, FUD

[alcmaeon]

1) My iPhone in standby mode does not DL my email until I hit the email button at which point it connects and begins the transfer of the email. This is a setting in the email settngs preferences. By default it is set to manual. This is where I left mine.

2) My iPhone, when it is actually turned off, as opposed to in standby mode (i.e. hold the top button down for 3 seconds rather than just pressing it) it doesn't even receive calls, much less email or anything else.

3) Does anyone on slashdot even own an iPhone? Most of the comments are completely clueless as to the actual operation of the device.

Re:There is no "Off" ?

[king-manic]

The iPhone has a radio-off mode, where it disables its cellphone antennae and wifi antennae. Its called 'airplane mode' and accessible through the settings.

It also has a power-off, where it essentially turns off everything except the sensor to turn it back on again. Not too many people even know this exists, even if they own an iPhone. If you press and hold the lock button at the top right, a screen will appear that says 'slide to turn off'... this is the only way to reboot the iPhone, I think.

Most people press the 'sleep' hold button once, thinking that 'turns it off', but all it does is disable the screen. its still running, and using its antennae.

I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of interface designers suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.

It is obvious - it works like every other phone.

[SuperKendall]

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.

Re:ihpones

[dk.r*nger]

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.

Customer will receive a new manual

[Provocateur]

The Samuel L Jackson version of the iPhone manual:

Chapter 2 "The Basics" (page 14) how to turn the iPod motherf***** off.

Re:There is no "Off" ?

[MrPerfekt]

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.

Re:ihpones

[ThePiMan2003]

That would be a great idea. And the really neat thing is that you can.

Terms in a contract aren't always upheld ...

[AHumbleOpinion]

For the same reason that someone who signs a contract without reading it and/or insisting on changes, deserves to be screwed. It's called a manual, it comes with the device, and you are allowed to read it. There is no "deception", only ignorance on the part of the user.

Terms in a contract are not always upheld. If they are too one sided, or absurd, a judge may rule something unconscionable. This is especially true for adhesion contracts, "take it or leave it", and even more so when there is a power imbalance between the parties such as large corp v a consumer.

AT&T + Europe + BlackBerry

[michael.j.jarvis]

I just traveled to Germany and France several weeks ago for family reasons. Needless to say I called ahead of time to AT&T and had an international plan placed on my account, and they advised me of several things which they do to all customers traveling abroad. 1) You will accrue charges if someone leaves a voicemail while your phone is on. 2) You will accrue charges for using the data (email, sms, etc) 3) If you want to avoid charges, keep your phone OFF, or turn off TD/RD. Standby will not stop charges from accruing. 4) I have a BlackBerry 8100, and sad to say my service in Europe was amazing. I got back to Boston, and standing in Logan Airport to see 1 bar of service almost made me cry. So the lesson to learn is to follow the old adage: Proper Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance.

I would mod you down, but used my last mod point.

[WilliamTS99]

Not only is it more then just a phone, but I have taken phones with me on trips back to the states that only work in Europe. Why? I used them on the way to and from the airport and wasn't prepared to throw it out just because it wouldn't work in the US.

Re:There is no "Off" ?

[TheCouchPotatoFamine]

my goodness what's with all of the strangely low amounts of intelligence here today? All of these posts seem to be implying that if a phone is not held against ones ear then it shouldnt recieve calls. OF COURSE sleep mode isnt off, otherwise THE PHONE WOULD NOT ANSWER CALLS!

Admittidly in this case it is easy to see the people were just ignorant of the phone's basic operation and, perhaps, international data should be opt-in. but to say this is due to bad UI design from apple is INSANE. If the iPhone sat in your pocket in sleep mode and DIDNT have a function to auto get emails, that would be bad design.

I just checked; auto fetching of email is OFF OFF OFF by default. These people are just the unlucky people who will remind the rest of you "non savvies" to think for a second. AND, if they used voice only for a week, you think they didnt see new email messages magically show up on their home screen of the unit? Yeah, RIGHT.

Typed from an iPhone.

Re:It is obvious - it works like every other phone

[igb]

When you shut your phone, does it turn off? Er... Yes, actually. And so it has been with every mobile I've ever owned.

Name one phone for which that's true. How does anyone with such a phone ever receive their calls?

This was completely avoidable

[DeepZenPill]

Just remove the battery.

Oh wait.

Re:There is no "Off" ?

[flyingfsck]

So when you put your desk phone on the cradle it is off and no-one can call you?

Re:It is obvious - it works like every other phone

[Nazmun]

Your too emotionally charged to understand what he's saying. Most phones even free ones released in the last 3-4 years go into a sleeplike mode called "standby" when not in active use or when you shut it closed (physically like if it's a flip phone). I'll bet your current phone is the same, it uses minimal power and can still receive calls unless you have a brick from 6 years ago.

My samsung A is the same and it takes 2-3 seconds of holding the end button to turn off.

Re:There is no "Off" ?

[Nazmun]

Yeah, but your phone receives calls and the iphone like many cellphones have a way to actually turn off by holding a button for a few seconds which these people when their 3 iphones didn't do.

Re:ihpones

[James McP]

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.

Re:ihpones

[Chris Burke]

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.

Re:ihpones

[ryanov]

Don't regular cellular phones have the same premise? One press for screen off, hold down for power off?

Re:It is obvious - it works like every other phone

[reidconti]

You still don't get it. I am happy for you that you seem to love bashing the iPhone and other overly complicated pieces of phone technology, but the "sleep mode" people speak of here is a red herring. The iPhone is like any other phone -- either on, or off. When I stop using my iphone, the display goes black to save battery. That's what people here are calling "standby." I don't know a single phone that doesn't power down its display to save battery.

These people were idiots, but hopefully AT&T makes things right-- that overcharge is just absurd.

The *only* difference is that the iPhone has no visible indicator of being on when the screen is black.

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.

Re:It is obvious - it works like every other phone

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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?

Re:It is obvious - it works like every other phone

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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.

It's the difference between Push and Pull

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:ihpones

[Rycross]

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.

Re:ihpones

[Killjoy_NL]

PC guy here, but.... don't you drag the Sim to the trashcan? ;)

not so easily filtered

[Crispy Critters]

"That one watt of output is in the gigahertz range, and is easily filtered"

It is not as easily filtered as you might think. Semiconductors have a tendency to rectify very high frequency signals, converting them into low frequency signals. Even discrete components can have problems, because you only need a tiny stray capacitance to get significant coupling at those frequencies. (Look at some numbers - a low stray capacitance is in the pF range, so what is 1/(2pi f C) for f of a few GHz?) It is easy to be stung by resonances unless you have a careful cascade of filters optimized for different frequency ranges.

Re:It is obvious - it works like every other phone

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

It's the only possible scenario since when you actually power the phone off, it's completely off.

Unfortunately, that isn't true. Another possible scenario is that the users (if you follow the article links, quite a few people have now been had by this one) did something they thought would switch off their phones, but in fact didn't, and then they couldn't tell the difference. And as I've said throughout this discussion, the latter is a serious usability flaw, given the potential consequences of the mistake.

Re:It is obvious - it works like every other phone

[PygmySurfer]

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.

Re:ihpones

[Mr. Mindless]

>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

>

Re:iPhone off with touchscreen?

[frdmfghtr]

Someone please correct / enlighten me, but how can the phone *ever* truely be OFF when it requires interaction on its touchsceen to turn it on again?

When the iPhone is off, you don't interact with the touch screen to turn it on. You have to press the sleep/wake button for several seconds (not just a quick tap and release) to turn it on again.

Using an iPhone abroad as an iPod?

[OgGreeb]

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.

Re:push email probably won't solve this problem

[antek9]

Nobody said they got 4800$ worth of emails. The bill would likely be within the same range if the users only received three emails all in all during that time. The traffic that caused the excessive billing was the iPhones' polling the mail servers 24/7. The roaming services likely charged something like 50 cents per connection, plus some per kilobyte rate. Let's say the iPhone polls once every 5 minutes. That adds up to (for 3 iPhones) 1.50$ twelve times an hour, or 18$/h. Which already puts it at >3000$ a week, so I overestimated my numbers. On the other hand, 25 cents per data exchange doesn't sound awfully expensive if it's from overseas, I figure.

Conclusion: The numbers do even more suggest that AT&T and Apple are at fault for not taking roaming costs into account. Considering the mobility people enjoy nowadays, even Apple users, this is just pure ignorance, plain and simple. You don't need more than a small IF or CASE statement that goes something like: IF (network.id="AT$T") THEN poll() ELSE idle(); to prevent this mess from happening.

Re:It's the button name ...

[wolrahnaes]

"Sleep" on a laptop means the device is dead, but keeping the memory powered so as to be able to restore instantly. That sounds like "Off" to me Sleep keeps the input devices and often the network interfaces active to some extent so that the device can be told to wake if it is needed.

Hmm, that sounds a lot like what the iPhone does...it goes in to a low power state but leaves its input partially active (two buttons) and keeps its network interface (GSM/EDGE) up in order to respond as it becomes needed.