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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...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.

Sleep/Wake Doesn't mean "Off"

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:Off means off

There is an airplane mode switch in the settings.

So

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

Oh, wait...

Requisite tag for this article: iphOWNED

I think that covers the situation nicely.

Soo..

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..

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

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

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!

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!

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!

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

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

Not the iPhone, but AT&T!

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

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:There is no "Off" ?

>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" ?

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

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:This had better get fixed

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.