Amazing first iPhone bill from Vodafone Australia

I've just received my first bill for iPhone 3G from Vodafone Australia.

As you can see it's rather excessive. I was unsure about what my data usage would be so I initially signed up on a business capped plan that would give me 500Mb per month.

There's a number of anomalies here, according to the online usage Vodafone say I'm entitled to 500Mb and that I've used 12.11Mb so far with 487.89Mb remaining:

On the phone it reports a total of 98.2Mb:

From the 15 page bill I've been sent, it looks like their billing system is continuing the old practice of charging in units of 5 minutes for any internet traffic:

Certainly not the way it's expressed in the plan agreement.

Presumably I'm not alone but I'll hop on the phone to them today and try to sort it out. Wow, that iPhone sure does increase data usage.

Did anyone else experience this?

Update 1

Lara seems to be having hickups this morning.. Anyhow, it turns out that when I purchased the iPhone, which can only be done on an iPhone plan, it was not immediately put on the iPhone plan but rather stayed on my old (high data cost) plan until the end of my billing cycle.

Gavin at Vodafone politely told me that nothing could be done and that I should talk to the store where the phone was purchased to take it up with them.

I've now spoken with Reggie at the dealer and he was sympathetic and said he'd call Retail Support about the issue and call me back...

Update 2

Reggie called back to let me know that the problem has been escalated to the "iPhone Taskforce" who are working through these issues. They will call me in about two weeks and I shouldn't worry about the bill in the mean time.

Update 3

Thanks to "tester" for the link to a thread on Whirlpool where "Kirsty from Vodafone" says:

"Hi guys,

Vodafone addressed the issue some of our customers have experienced with purchasing their iPhone cap plans midway through their normal billing cycle in a press release dated 25/07/2008. In the past, plans were only changed on the bill cycle date. We acknowledge that this is not practical for customers signing up for the new iPhone 3G caps. From 23 July, anyone signing up for a iPhone 3G cap will immediately be able to enjoy the benefits of their new plan, rather than waiting for their bill cycle date.

Vodafone is reviewing the excess data usage of it's customers who signed up to an iPhone 3G cap mid way through their bill cycle, and will waive any charges that would not have been incurred if the customer had been able to use their iPhone 3G cap, with its voice and data allowance, from the outset."

This is certainly good to hear.

Update 4

7-September-2008

I'm pleased to report that my bill has been re-issued and I've received a credit for $1,500 on that bill.

iPhone 2.0.1 still not quite right yet, 2.0.2 better

Like everyone I had a few annoying issues with the original software but I still feel it's the best phone/pocket internet device, I've ever used.

One of the most annoying little issues I've had is that syncing the phone would hang during the phone backup. Once I thought it was going to finish without me cancelling but then a call came in.

My update to 2.0.1 went smoothly and during my first sync I hoped the problem would be gone but no. Amusingly the log says:

Backups still don't complete so I've done this:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes DeviceBackupsDisabled -bool true

Anyhow, my problems aren't nearly as annoying as Ben's so I count myself lucky.

The phone does seem smoother with 2.0.1, the annoying pauses have gone away and I think the 3G switching problem I had might have improved a bit.

Update 2.0.2

After a day with 2.0.2, I'm pleased to report that it drops back to 2G in my bad 3G signal environment much more smoothly than before.

It still won't backup my phone, so I've disabled that.

The Console log says:

20/08/08 10:40:13 AM [0x0-0x27027].com.apple.iTunes[365] MobileDevice: receive_message: Could not receive size of message: 0 Unknown error: 0 
20/08/08 10:40:13 AM [0x0-0x27027].com.apple.iTunes[365] MobileDevice: _read_callback: Could not receive message 
20/08/08 10:40:13 AM [0x0-0x27027].com.apple.iTunes[365] MobileDevice: send_message: Could not send message size: Bad file descriptor 
20/08/08 10:40:40 AM [0x0-0x27027].com.apple.iTunes[365] Created child to sync device with pid 738... 

And it hangs at that point.

Got a 3G iPhone pretty easily in Sydney

I've been hanging out for an iPhone for a long time. Rather than going to the city I decided to head for Warringah Mall north of Sydney.

I got to the Vodafone store at about 8 for a 9am opening. There were 8 people in the queue and security guards hanging around. (The store said they were mostly worried about a robbery over night as the phones were hidden out the back).

Doing the paper work and using the Vodafone systems was an incredibly poor and slow experience. Part of the process involved ringing up and we waited 55 minutes in the phone queue. In the end I brought the phone home to "unbrick" (as they call it).

This little Vodafone store had 60 in stock. Everyone I spoke to in the queue wanted the 16Gb black version, while we were waiting a sales person from Crazy Johns was trying to offload some 8Gb models but no one seemed interested.

My home has poor signal from Vodafone and if the bars on the display are anything to go by reception is better than my past phones. In a call (to Ben) it seems like the audio is good but I do still need to find a good spot at home.

Oh the security guard you can see in the shot rushed over to tell me that I'm not allowed to take pictures after the shot above. Strange days..

Updates

So far I've bought the iPhone version of OmniFocus but the syncing update for the mac is due on the 10th (US time) so hasn't turned up yet.

NetNewswire is free so I got that but they want me to sign up on newsgator so I haven't done that yet.

The GPS seems very fast to get a fix, I walked outside and took a picture and the lat long is in the photo's exif.

I wonder why they don't allow a "turn by turn" navigator? I would definitely buy that...

The iTunes remote is kind of cute.

No glitches so far, very smooth user experience.

Update 2

Mobile Me seems to be working now and yes it pushed an email to the phone, it took about 20 seconds. Now, I understand that a single connection exists from the phone to Apple to do the pushing, I wonder if I get charged for that data?

Apps so far

The Apple Remote Control app is really great. I remember they had a patent on this and I'd have to say it blows away any other remote control, at least for talking to iTunes. This feature prompted us to set up some living room speakers connected to a mac and do some music listening.

Truphone does voice over the wifi network. I already have credit on Skype so really that's what I want but until they release I'll use Truphone. Voice quality is fine but the delay seems very long.

A Chat with Ben and Pete - Episode 7

Project Blackbox, Songbird and more.

We chat about the world of XWindows on Leopard, Sun’s Project Blackbox, developments in the python based web framework, Django, more wake from sleep problems with the Mac, an iPhone MMS application, the Google charts API, and an amazing iTunes clone, Songbird.

Subscribe or just download.

iPhones on sale in Bellevue, WA

It was a friendly crowd, friendly staff, and friendly security guards.

Other shoppers stood on the level above watching the queue wait patiently as the big iPhone demo screens in the window counted down second by second.

Two minutes out the black paper was ripped from the windows.

As the final seconds counted down the staff formed an honour guard and clapped the eager shoppers as they filed in to plunk down their $500 (plus a two year contract).

This all went really smoothly, but I think the real genius, from a telco perspective, is that these folks just bought the box and then headed home to do all the churning and provisioning via iTunes.

Safari on a big touch screen might be great but having your customers do their contract sign up at home, rather than holding up staff in your store is brilliant. I'll buy one, but not until it does 3G. 

iPhone news story predictions

It's Wednesday, two days before launch, and I thought I'd predict the stories that we'll see over the coming weeks and months in advance.

iPhone dissassembled - yes, someone will pull one apart, within hours, and publish photos of the interior.

iPhone screen cracked - someone will sit on their phone and, yes, the glass screen will crack, duh.

iPhone screen scratched - despite the glass surface, folks will carry iPhones in a pocket full of keys or diamonds or something and it will scratch.

Complaints about AT&T's data network - this has started even before release by the reviewers. The iPhone makes people even more aware of how bad mobile carrier data services are.

How to unlock the iPhone's SIM lock - so you can use it with other carriers and take it abroad. I'm sure it's well secured but someone will figure this out. Will it be weeks or months?

Build and install your own software on iPhone - it's running MacOS X, it has a CPU with available tool-chains, people will figure out how to add software or turn on sshd. Hopefully Apple will release some decent tools at least for creating widgets.

Linux booting on iPhone - like on iPods, there's not much real point except to show that if you release hardware, someone will reverse engineer it enough to boot something else on it.

Replace the iPhone battery - it sounds like it worked great when new, but after a year of daily charge/discharge cycles, the battery will lose capacity and folks will want to replace it. Just like iPods, third parties will step up and offer kits or services.

New iPhone features in software alone - but not as much as we might hope. Like the iPods, this is a blank canvas for software to run on, but while there will be a few updates, I think we'll find that we are buying a new model to get the new compelling features every two years.

iPhone versions with more memory - hardly worth mentioning, but yes, within a year there will be iPhones with 16Mb and 32Mb. Here is a platform for showing movies, there needs to be a device with 100Gb.

iTunes on iPhone - you want that song, and you want it now right? You have a billing account with your carrier and an iTunes account. You can buy the tune and download it on the spot. The download will be unbilled by the carrier.

Multi-touch iPod range - all the larger iPods will come out in multi-touch models with large screens. Perhaps the nano will remain as it's such a good form factor and is so physically strong. The big question is will these new iPods have wireless and will they therefore include Safari and email.

iPhone inspired phones from others - already Nokia has re-considered their objection to touch screen phones. Apple claimed to own "multi-touch" but then Microsoft showed their table top interface which seems to work the same way. Yes, we'll see phones that are all touch screen from the others as well.

Stories we won't see

I'm going out on a limb here...

Skype for iPhone - Not in the short term (two years) this would harm the carriers potentially fatally. Imagine if there was an iPhone with a VOIP client and a WiMax modem. You wouldn't need a phone carrier at all.

MMS for iPhone - People are saying it's a missed feature, but really do we need old broken MMS on modern devices. If Safari on the iPhone is the real internet, then email is real MMS. It's time MMS died. 

An apology.

Sorry to anyone who was searching for one of these predictions and came across this posting, thinking that their dream had come true.

Let me know what I've missed. I'll put dates next to the items as they come true. Should be fun.