iphone

I’m not an expert, but an article in yesterday’s Sunday Mail had me a bit confused. According to Brad Crouch’s “exclusive” Russell Wortley, an Upper House MP whom I have never heard of, was charged with a $10,500 phone bill from Telstra.

Faced with such an amount, the man does what anyone would naturally do and blame his offspring, claiming that his son downloaded over $7000 worth of “supposedly free phone applications”.

I want to attack this from two sides; first about the man and his son, then I want to briefly touch on how Brad Crouch retarded an already stupid piece of shit news.
First up, we’ll see how many applications his son would of had to download using Mr. Wortley’s phone for such a bill. Apparently it is suspected that the iPhone doesn’t have a data package bundled with the plan, which is what allows for cheaper downloads via 3G internet. The article has Craig Middleton, a spokesperson from Telstra, say “If you don’t have a data pack you’ll be paying $2 a megabyte”. This is news to me, but I’ve always had a data package because I know internet on 3G can get expensive.
So we have the rate of two dollars a megabyte. Now, iPhone’s have a feature which prevents you from downloading any application 10 megabytes or greater unless you’re connected to wireless internet, or downloading via iTunes. So for the sake of this post we’ll assume every single application was exactly ten megabytes, though it’s almost certain that many of them would of been one to five. The article has Wortley claim the two biggest “downloads in a short period” were $4000 and $3000. So we’ll assume that this is all that his son is accused of spending. So with some simple maths:

You remember my epic MS Paint skills, right?

For those who aren’t quite with it, I divided the total sum of money by the total cost of a single 10MB application ($2 for every megabyte makes it 20), to reveal his son would of had to download 350 applications. Now, an iPhone 3G has a maximum of 9 pages for applications. Each page displays 16 applications, and there are 4 on the floating dock at the bottom. This means an iPhone can only hold 148 applications, including those shipped with the phone (Messages, Weather, Settings, etc). This means if I went on a download spree I could only download 133 applications before the iPhone would stop me. After that I’d have to delete other applications before I could keep going. Why didn’t he monitor his son’s use of the phone, and did he actually use his phone during any of that month? The fact that Wortley didn’t notice that his phone suddenly had hundreds of extra applications displays just how irresponsible he is with his mobile phone.
Wortley says “I don’t think parents or children would be aware that what appear to be free applications can cost a fortune in downloading where you get hit with thousands of dollars in bills over an hour.”. This shows his complete naivety in how things work. For thousands of dollars to be incurred in downloading applications, the “child” at fault would need to download hundreds of applications without trying any, and deleting them all as they went. If they did that, then I’d be suspicious as to whether or not they weren’t just getting back at their parents for not letting them go out that day. “Can’t see my friends? Then I’ll rape my phone bill with a metaphorical rake handle.”
In any case, it is unlikely that the costs were the result of just application downloads. It was more likely a combination of that, phone calls and internet browsing. I find that excessive use of YouTube can eat through my data rather quickly. If Wortley knew how to actually use an iPhone, he might also gain the ability to go into Settings and disable the Application Store, YouTube, and even the internet browser. Case solved. Wortley, you’re an idiot.

 Also, you probably used up your downloads watching YouTube videos).

Now, I want to talk about Brad Crouch. His article, which was made to look like an article about Russel Wortley’s lack of responsibility, instead points the finger in a more generalized direction. The article uses sentences like “has revealed a phone fiasco where unsuspecting users can be charged more than $4000 an hour for so called free phone applications” and uses Wortley’s case as an example.
The article is deliberately written to make the companies (which in this case I guess would make it both Apple and Telstra) look like evil overlords who specifically designed the phone and subsequent services to rip off as many people as they can. Now sure, they’re here to make money, but by no means are they trying to trick you. At the time of the sale, Telstra are legally obliged to explain things including how 3G and their data plans work. Therefore, unless there was a problem and Telstra ACCIDENTLY charged them too much¹, it really is due to the irresponsible person rather than the sinister corporations.

In short, Mr. Wortley should of been more careful, and probably should have monitored what his child was doing with his government phone.

 Hello, is this Mr. Atkinson? You are a poo head (Photo by Nieve44/La Luz)

I remain perplexed as to how he believes he can blame it all on application downloads and still claim to be unaware, given the evidence². What do you think of the situation?

1. Wortley confessing they made the downloads, even though I still doubt it was through application downloads, means this is more than likely not the case
2. evidence I explained rather messily, but explained regardless

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