Aussies are apparently incandescent with rage over the way the iPhone is costing them an arm and a leg.

There are more than 350 complaints a day to consumer authorities about the high cost of owning new generation smartphones in a phenomenon known as ''bill shock''. The Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman, Deirdre O'Donnell, said customers, confused by caps on downloading emails and data, were being hit with exorbitant charges. She said that his office got more than 1000 complaints a day, and about 33 to 35 per cent will be around bill shock.

A typical complaint was a girl updating her Facebook page on her way home getting saddled with a $700 bill. O'Donnell said consumers were easily confused by data downloading caps because they were expressed in terms of megabytes or gigabytes. Typical plans include caps set at 25 megabytes, 200 megabytes, 500 megabytes or one gigabyte. She said it was impossible for punters to envisage what those caps mean in terms of time spent on the internet or sending emails.

Australian Communications Consumer Action Group, Allan Asher, said data caps expressed in terms of megabytes were the root of the problem. A contract which allows you three megabytes per month might seem pretty cheap and punters don't know what that means until they get a $600 bill when they were expecting a $200 bill.

Other traps include bills for premium services, international roaming, horoscopes, television voting and ringtones was common. One bloke got a bill for 23,000 after being overseas for a period of three weeks.

It just turned out that all the data, satellite navigation and emails were being billed at a very high roaming rate.