Watch out, smartphone users. Telstra has announced that they will allow Windows Phone 7 users to add their app purchases to their NextG bill. How long until we start seeing the media tell us about App bill shock?
Watch out, smartphone users. Telstra has announced that they will allow Windows Phone 7 users to add their app purchases to their NextG bill. How long until we start seeing the media tell us about App bill shock?
Simon Potts
Tuesday, October 12, 2010 at 12:45 PMIf anyone gets one of these things for a teenager I feel for them
Travis
Tuesday, October 12, 2010 at 3:03 PMAs long as you can still purchase apps without adding them to your bill, it’s all good.
I know that most employees with company owned phones would not be impressed if you can only buy apps through your telco, as it would violate most company agreements to buy them that way.
Hopefully Telstra will enable companies (and parents too perhaps) the ability to block these purchases.
Stephen Parry
Tuesday, October 12, 2010 at 3:24 PMOh great.
Nathan Holmes
Tuesday, October 12, 2010 at 8:41 PMAm I the only one who thinks this is a good thing?
matt
Wednesday, October 13, 2010 at 2:23 AMyeah… like how is it any different from getting the shock when the bill of the credit card linked with iTunes arrives (has been reported once I think)
this is no better, but no worse either.
also, the big thing with telco bill shock isn’t how easy it is to spend money, its how easy it is to spend F**K LOADS of money.
its the way that they’re like “oh, you get 500meg of data with your $30 cap, (but if you go over, its $12 a meg).”
so a song goes from being a 50c download to a $36 one, as soon as you hit some arbitrary and relatively secret limit. (like, if it was 10 songs included a month, people can easily keep track of that, but wtf is a megabyte? they are all just quietly eaten up by everything without the user really knowing)
it should be made mandatory by regulators that all phones on plans like this have built in ‘apps’ to accurately track usage. at the very least.
Steve
Wednesday, October 13, 2010 at 4:16 PMI think the worst case of misleading data pricing is the “Megabit/Megabyte” confusion. It might sound like a technicality, but 8x is a huge difference and you can very easily find yourself nuking your stingy data plan confusing the two.