As you enjoy your weekend, ponder this bit of humor: while the iPhone may be master of the digital mobile experience (for now), dead trees come in for a flogging, as AT&T's iPhone bills are quite impressive in their own right. We're starting to get bills for the iPhone here at Ars, and while many of us have had smartphones for some time, we've never seen a bill like this.

One of our bills is a whopping 52 pages long, and my own bill is 34 pages long. They're printed on both sides, too. What gives?

The AT&T bill itemizes your data usage whenever you surf the Internet via EDGE, even if you're signed up for the unlimited data plan. AT&T also goes into an incredible amount of detail to tell you—well, almost nothing. For instance, I know that on July 27 at 3:21 p.m. I had some data use that, under the To/From heading, AT&T has helpfully listed as "Data Transfer." The Type of file? "Data." My total charge? $0.00.

This mind-numbing detail goes on for 52 double-sided pages (for 104 printed pages!) with absolutely no variance except the size of the files.

The picture above is one half of one page. As you can plainly see, with all the information they give away as to my surfing habits, that image makes me a ripe target for identity theft. Or not. Okay, so maybe we should be happy that the pages upon pages of info in this bill aren't going to send privacy advocates into seizures, but then again, why waste the paper?





Guess which one is the iPhone bill

Apple's renown for elegance and simplicity has been ironically mocked by this ridiculous document of excess. Why would we possibly need to know how many times we weren't charged to access something of the type DATA using our Data Transfer at the Rate Code MBRF? Our Blackberry users 'round these parts aren't seeing bills like this.

Oh, well—I suppose when I'm out using my iPhone, I can imagine AT&T's line printer working tirelessly to provide me and thousands of others with an IRS-sized document dump every month. Ah, how simple and easy it is to live in the digital age.