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. ""

Off means off

[Alex777 (1113887)]

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

[Ichelo (690294)]

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

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

[B1 (86803)]

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

[fredmosby (545378)]

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

[apparently (756613)]

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

[Anonymous Brave Guy (457657)]

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

[gEvil (beta) (945888)]

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.

It is obvious - it works like every other phone.

[SuperKendall (25149)]

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:It is obvious - it works like every other phone

[Anonymous Brave Guy (457657)]

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:Off means off

[itsdapead (734413)]

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

[ZorinLynx (31751)]

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

[cnettel (836611)]

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

[RMH101 (636144)]

...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

[aug24 (38229)]

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

[neapolitan (1100101)]

> 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 [elsevier.com]

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.

Sleep/Wake Doesn't mean "Off"

[Gary W. Longsine (124661)]

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"

[clickety6 (141178)]

You might find this article interesting then

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

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

Re:Off means off

[Rycross (836649)]

There is an airplane mode switch in the settings.

Re:Off means off

[Rycross (836649)]

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

Re:Off means off

[Rycross (836649)]

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:I have played with an iPhone in a store

[haystor (102186)]

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

So

[niceone (992278)]

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

Oh, wait...

Requisite tag for this article: iphOWNED

[jimstapleton (999106)]

I think that covers the situation nicely.

Soo..

[Kazymyr (190114)]

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 (190789)]

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).

How to make BIG BUCKS with your iPhone

[word munger (550251)]

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 (1041058)]

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.

Re:Try turning it off instead of sleeping the disp

[quantum bit (225091)]

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

Gap in the market!

[adycarter (261257)]

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 (190114)]

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 (170761)]

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.

boycott

[Skapare (16644)]

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

Not the iPhone, but AT&T!

[by 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 [slashdot.org] to blog about evil corporations [mcgrew.info] lately, this is probably all I'll have to say about these bastards.

-mcgrew (sm62704)

Need "budget mode" for devices

[whyde (123448)]

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.

Not the full story.

[Dzimas (547818)]

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 (851729)]

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.

A reading from TFM...

[Americano (920576)]

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 [apple.com]:

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.

Bullshit

[Mikey-San (582838)]

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:There is no "Off" ?

[gad_zuki! (70830)]

>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" ?

[fredklein (532096)]

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

Then why should an iPhone?

Re:There is no "Off" ?

[Richthofen80 (412488)]

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.

Re:ihpones

[evilgrug (915703)]

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

Re:ihpones

[dk.r*nger (460754)]

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.

AT&T Growing Pains

[Gary W. Longsine (124661)]

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.

It's the difference between Push and Pull

[by 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

[ThePiMan2003 (676665)]

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

Re:ihpones

[Chris Burke (6130)]

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:This had better get fixed

[CronoCloud (590650)]

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:The law needs to clarify things like this

[SolitaryMan (538416)]

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 [xkcd.com]

Re:The law needs to clarify things like this

[Anonymous Brave Guy (457657)]

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.