(((Because he's the EDITOR OF WIRED MAGAZINE and he STILL got hammered just because he left the damn thing turned on his pocket!)))
http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2007/12/q-whats-the-wor.html
Link: The Long Tail: Q: what's The worst thing you can do with an iphone?.
December 13, 2007
Q: what's The worst thing you can do with an iphone?
A: Simply leave it on in your pocket when you leave the country. I've just got back from ten days abroad (from Amsterdam to Israel to several cities in China) and while I was in China AT&T cut off my phone service. Why? Because I'd run up a $2,100 bill. And how did that happen, when I hardly used the phone at all? Because the iPhone's email app keeps automatically fetching email every fifteen minutes even when it's roaming abroad.
I know I am the last person on the planet to discover this, and I'm sure that it's my fault because at some point in the past I must have gotten annoyed by the roaming data warning and turned Data Roaming on, but the way AT&T handled this mistake is insane. At around $2,000 (I didn't know the amount at the time) they sent me a text message saying only that my "international data use is high" and that I should call a US number (at $2/minute) to "prevent a costly bill".
Needless to say, I had no idea what "high" meant, and I wasn't inclined to incur a huge voice bill from China for the privilege of hanging on hold with customer service for the usual 20 minutes simply to find out what this text message meant. And the next day they shut off my phone and froze my account. To their credit, they have since offered to retroactively put me on an international data roaming plan that would cut the bill to $300 or so, but because I didn't call customer service from China when I got that message, they're having trouble putting this through. So for now, the bill stands.
Needless to say, AT&T could have easily avoided screwing me like this....(((specifics follow)))
