We hate to say this, but in the interest of fairness we must: sometimes it really is the customer’s fault. A man took his three iPhones out of the country, and now he’s got a $4800 roaming bill because he didn’t turn them off and they kept checking for email. Well, he didn’t turn them off off. You know, there’s standby off and off off. Or maybe you didn’t know? It’s all in the Apple iPhone User Guide—we just looked at it online and it’s right there on page 14: how to put your phone in standby (which just turns off the screen) and how to shut it off completely.

Or you can check out pages 49 and 50, where it shows you how to disable an email account temporarily or permanently so that it doesn’t check for messages. Or look at page 94, where it explains the airplane mode: ‘When airplane mode is on… no cell phone, radio, Wi-Fi, or Bluetooth signals are emitted from iPhone. You can’t make calls, send or receive text messages, stream YouTube videos, or get stock quotes, map locations, or weather reports.”

Our point isn’t to be smart-asses about someone’s dumb mistake, since we all make those every week. (The folks at Slashdot are going back and forth about whether or not he should be held responsible.) But it’s interesting to see Apple’s “it just works” sensibility brought to its logical conclusion. We suspect the greater their market share grows, the more we’ll see supposedly “anti-Apple” stories like this, brought on by cheerfully oblivious consumers.

“AT&T is cruising for a bruising” [The Inquirer via Slashdot via a reader tip]

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