Time Zone Fail!
 

I just arrived at the firstleg of my trip. I turned on my phone to call and say I'd arrived. The phone automatically reset its clok to local time. (good)

I looked at my calendar for my nexy flight, and the time was changed! My entire calendar was adjusted by the difference in time zones. I've manually reset (all?) of my upcoming flights, I think.

1) How could I have prevented this?!!

2) Will MfE adjust all my times on my Outlook calendar in California? Over what time span?

HELP!!

Re: Time Zone Fail!
 

i dont know if there is some mechanism somewhere for managing time zones.

Im assuming you recorded the flight times according to their own time zones, so boarding was in the original time zone and landing was in the destination's time zone. When you arrived at the destination it adjusted your already adjusted flight times again.

There is a description section at the bottom of all calendar entries. At the very least i suppose you could input the time there and it wouldnt be changed.

Re: Time Zone Fail!
 

I could also use a paper calendar. I was hoping that wasn't a superior solution. Now I'm not so sure. :-(

Re: Time Zone Fail!
 

there is no way preventing it. there is 2 ways to handle these kind of timezone changes, both will cause errors and disruption....

Re: Time Zone Fail!
 

Allowing me to prevent such adjustments (essentially defining all entries as "local time") would entirely prevent it without causing disruption.

As mmurfin87 alluded to, when ther's ambiguity I usually have both times (e.g. 14:30PDT 17:30EDT) in a note.

Re: Time Zone Fail!
 

Solution: Don't "Update automatically".

Re: Time Zone Fail!
 

This is not connected only to automatic updating of time, it is happening when you switch time zone too. This is propably the single dumbest thing on Nokia phones, the(ir) Symbian phones do the same thing.

What happens is this: you plan a trip (at home) record your flights, meetings etc in the calendar. Then you travel, and switch the time on your phone by switching the time zone (or by letting the auto-update switch for you). Due to some odd logic all your appointments are then adjusted accordingly, so for example an alarm would go off correctly, at your home time but would be wrong at your local, real, time.

What should happen is of course that a time zone change should leave all your appointments time intact, after all you will note your flight back in local time to begin with.

The mess is complete if you then, when travelling, agree meetings etc for the future, they are of course also adjusted when you switch back to home time.

Solution: Don't allow autoupdate (which would be handy), and don't use time zone (which would be logical & easy), but manually change the time on your device from the settings.

The only plausible explanation is that Nokia's programmers have never, ever been on a business trip or that they use paper calendars :rolleyes:.

It would be very interesting if someone had an explanation why this is made to work so backwards....

Re: Time Zone Fail!
 

Dirty Harry,

Actually i could see that it´s not so odd logic if you think about it. If we first say that all the stuff what you put in calendar IS locked to your current timezone. This is IMHO really really logical because if you set like "call to John doe at 08:00" (in your home timezone) and then you go abroad on different timezone calendar still tells you correct time even thought you are on different timezone. Not so odd to me :|

.edit
Question might be
What really is the right time?

Re: Time Zone Fail!
 

Slender,

Good example, but....
How many of your calendar markings are in reality like that? Vs all the meetings, flights etc which you get and need in "local time" to begin with?

And what if you are in a "foreign timezone" and want to add "Call John Doe at 08:00" next week when you will be back home?

I would maintain that the most logical way would be not to change calendar times at all. Now both timezone and auto-update of time are useless for most (all?) travelers who use their calendar.

Re: Time Zone Fail!
 

as I said: there are 2 options. if youre preference would be used, there would be others complaining...

a system setting for it would probably be only good way to handle the issue.

Re: Time Zone Fail!
 

The best way would be to have the ability to enter TZ info in the times. When have you ever had a flight and connecting flight info in anything other than local time.

I WISH I could hav kept the calendar expressed in PDT. I now need to call airlines for a my flights this trip to see if I corrected ALL of them. Especially since agenda view dosen't cover all my travel this trip.

I'm mostly concerned about whether MfE will "update" my Outlook calendar back home.

Re: Time Zone Fail!
 

So how do I do the following:

1) turn off "automatic update

2) manually set my calendar to PDT????

Re: Time Zone Fail!
 

that would certainly an unambigous way of defining times. The default could be the local TZ with a pull done for others.

Re: Time Zone Fail!
 

OK, I wenr to "Settings"/"Date and Time"

and fooled my phone into being on PDT. I re-re-changed my flight times, so everything could be OK. This is basically what I've done with my otheer phones, so it should work.

Academic questions remain:

) How does MfE treat automatically changed meeting times? I HOPE the Outlook data "back home" is unchanged.

) Thiis SHOULD be a manual adjustment to the CALENDAR app, so that other time/location apps are unaffected. Does my kludge affect GPS/eCoach/photoTagging, etc.?

Re: Time Zone Fail!
 

This time change has been standard on every other smartphone I have had (symbian, windows, and blackberry). Outlook (running locally or connected to an exchange server) also works in this manner. On the server, it keeps the time in a single timezone (probably GMT, but perhaps calculated to the meridian through Bill Gates's kitchen?) and the client converts it to local time.

The use case for changing times is that your appointments are shown at the correct local time wherever you are. So if you have a phone call at noon Austin time, and you travel to LA, your reminder will ring and remind you that the call is local 10am. This has always worked perfectly for me when I travel.

Airline flights are different, though. The airlines give you your departure and arrival times in local at each end. So if you are flying from Austin to LA, they will show a 10am (central time) departure and an 11:30am (pacific time) arrival.

For the last several years, I have put my flights into my calendar (on any device) with arrival and departure times entirely in LOCAL time for me. So I would have listed the above flight on my calendar from 10am to 1:30pm. To keep myself from going insane, I include the local times in the note for the calendar entry. I do this for all appointments that I will be having in another timezone as well (if I make a 3pm appointment in LA, I have to put it in the calendar as 5pm local time in Austin)

Doing this, my appointments automatically timeshift properly, my flights show the proper duration on my calendar, and my alarms ring at the proper time. I think that this is the proper use of calendars across time zones, even though it seems like a workaround. (The system you are working around is the centuries old problem of the disconnect between a local solar time and a universal standard time. I blame George Graham and his damnable deadbeat escapement. And, of course, the British for sponsoring him. Always the British.)

Re: Time Zone Fail!
 

@merren: So if you are in Austin and agree to a weeks worth of appointments in LA you enter them all in Austin time. And then when in LA agreeing meetings for next week back home in Austin you enter them in LA time? Gee... all this to use the magic Auto time update? But I can maybe see your point, if you have more conference calls tha actual local appointments.

Re: RWFarleys question about MfE I can't give a definitive answer. but I've never had an issue w the MfE sync to Google calendar, although I am traveling very frequently. Anyhow this bone-headed implementation has been on my Nokias for so long that I'm used to it, and haven't really tested.

Just ignore the TZ and turn auto-time update OFF. Pretend this functionality doesn't exist and change your time manually from settings whenever travelling. Problem solved, and I think this is the easiest solution.

What comes to Nokias logic, for my usage it is pretty obvious that out of 2 options they choose the really dumb one. In merrens case it seems that he has more conference calls than actual meetings in the calendar. From my perspective he TZ /Auto-time should just leave calendar items untouched, I 'm pretty sure most frequent traveler that uses the calendar would agree; in a corporate environment this is pretty self evident. But of course some preference settings would be the ideal solution, as Ossipena suggested.

Re: Time Zone Fail!
 

@Dirty Harry: You live in a world with multiple time zones (I assume). You are always in one of them. It's nice to pretend they don't exist, but at some point you have to deal with it.

I am trying to get my kids to start working on unix time (number of milliseconds since 00:00 on Jan 1 1970), but they are having trouble figuring out how to set their alarm clocks. And they don't like the fact that it makes my birth date a negative number.

Re: Time Zone Fail!
 

As a frequent global traveler in a corporate environment, I wholeheartedly disagree with you. In my world, my clients and I are linked (and some may say ruled) by our Outlook calendars, which automatically adjusts our shared meeting invites for timezone. So, any client invitation will be adjusted to my local time in Outlook, which means that I will know that I have to call in at 9AM EST for a 3PM CET teleconference without having to think about it. I sync my outlook calendar to my N900. Since outlook renders my entire calendar in terms of my home base local time, I actually much appreciate the N900's automatic time shift. So, if I have to fly in for that 3PM CET meeting, my N900 will tell me I need to be at that meeting at 3PM, and not 9AM (which is what my calendar would say if it were to remain static).

The tricky thing of course is when entering events on the N900. You do have to make the conversion yourself to account for any time zone differences (and as I have discovered, daylight/standard time if you schedule months into the future). As long as you consistently schedule with your current timezone as your reference point, you should be fine. Yeah, to have to remember to enter a 9AM NYC meeting as 3PM because I happen to be in Frankfurt is something I had to get used to.. But for me, the convenience of the auto time-shift outweighs the annoyances.

With that being said, I do agree that the option to specify a timezone when entering an event would be a useful one to have.

Re: Time Zone Fail!
 

I'll admit I paniced when my phone reset. On my past phones I never let them get out of my home time zone. Was I prompted or simply more alert in my youth?

That being said, a facility to set the calendar - independently from the N900 - to different time zones would be useful. Each of the problems mentioned would be helped with this functionality.

Re: Time Zone Fail!
 

Interesting. It seems that there are users who really appreciate how this works now, I would never have believed....I guess we just have to wait for an option then...but it's gonna be a long wait.

Re: Time Zone Fail!
 

Example 1 of why this kludge (lie to the OS about the time zone) should instead be a setting to have the Calendar express time in a usre chosen time zone

Both Orrery and mClock are showing incorrect results.

All we travelers need is to have Calendar express itself in a user selected time zone. All the "hard stuff" has already been coded to allow the autmatic change that confused me to begin with. Just make it "N00bie discoverable" in the Calendar's menues.

Re: Time Zone Fail!
 

Hmm I haven't travelled anywhere but I noticed another problem with the Time Zone stuff. I am in Edmonton, Canada. I switched cell providers and it made me go through the regional settings again when I inserted the new SIM. For some reason, they have the alberta cities listed as GMT -6, when they are really GMT-7. Vancouver, which should be GMT-8 is listed as -7, so I switched to that. The time on my phone is not changed, but the offset on text messages due to some javascript hack someone made was affected. This is really stupid though, if daylight savings is changing things, they should have that seperate. I'm going to switch back to the other SIM and see what happens though.

-edit-
ok i swapped sims, when you put in a new one it shows the correct timezones for you to choose from initially. i think what's happening is that the "update automatically" adjusts more than it should.

Re: Time Zone Fail!
 

The first time I ran into this was with Windows Mobile 5.0 on my HTC (then called UTStar Com in the US) Apache/PPC-6700.

It actually also happens in Windows (any version) when using Outlook, on a laptop. At least in that case you can just leave your laptop on your home time :D Phones that automatically change to local time tend to make calendars challenging.

My understanding of the rationale for this behavior is that appointments schedule using local time (vs UTC time) should be moved when your time relative to your old time is different (like you change time zones.)

I don't really know how to schedule an appointment in UTC on the n900. In Outlook, you can click the Time Zones option in the ribbon when you make an appointment and indicate what time zone the time is relative to - I assume if you do this, that appointment would behave rationally if you found yourself IN that time zone, at some future point in time.

In other words, your data is faulty :D

Re: Time Zone Fail!
 

All it would take to "fix" this for all use cases would be to have a setting to allow forcing the calendar to use a "non-device" time zone.

Then the other mapping/clock/astronomy programs on the device would still work perfectly.

Re: Time Zone Fail!
 

Just my story. I went to Japan for a 3 week vacation. In Finland I had the return flight time set in my N900 calendar. As the time went by and was the time to go home, I checked my calendar and thought "oh, the flight is 16.30 in the evening". Don't have to get up early.

You can all guess what happened.

Yeah, I maybe should have used my brain a little more and read the actual travel documents once more. But I really didn't see that coming. I just automatically assumed that my calendar events would be as I have entered.

Once solution would probably be an explicit Time Zone button in the +Add Event dialog. Then the user would at least think about time zones when entering. As an infrequent traveler it didn't even enter my mind.

Re: Time Zone Fail!
 

There's a bug where calendar follows the timezone of the original appointment, followed here: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=54203

The fix for now, is to always set calendar to the local timezone at the time it is created. Once the phone 'updates automatically', the calendar will adjust to the new timezone.