Notices

Gah! I thought I'd got away from this ludicrous behavior when I left WinMo!

Why do appointments in the calendar on my N900 move when you change timezones? Does anyone who makes appointments to be fulfilled in another country calculate the local time of a meeting in order to enter it into their calendar? No - you call someone on the phone, say "I'll meet you at 1pm in London" and you enter that into your calendar. And when you get to London and change the timezone so the clock is correct, the calender should be representative, but it's not - the appointment has moved.

Appointments should be immutable and shouldn't move under any circumstances. Or, at least, appointments should be tied to a timezone when they're created so if the device's timezone changes, only those appointments which are tied to the new timezone changes.

For example, I live in GMT+1, I make an appointment to meet a friend when I get back from London at 8pm. Then, in London I call the friend and he tries to confirm the meeting - my calendar now says we're meeting at 7pm when I get back, which is just wrong.

Is there any way around this?

Hmm... Seems like I'm the only person bothered by my appointments being moved around.

Never managed to understand why this behaviour seems sensible to developers. Guess I'll just have to keep changing my clock rather than timezone when I travel and be done with it...

Personally, I think that it is essential that appointments time-shift. For a lot of us on outlook, meeting invites already account for time zone, and it is very handy that these meetings time-shift on my N900 as I travel from time-zone to time-zone. For example, I am in metro New York, and my calendar shows a 9AM client meeting in Frankfurt later this week. This, of course, is equivalent to 3PM local Frankfurt time. I like that when I am in Germany later this week, my schedule will show that the meeting is at 3, so I don't look like a fool walking in to the client site at 9.

Different strokes for different strokes, I guess. But, there are a couple of options for you:

1. If you are entering meeting times on your n900, always enter the time equivalent for your current time zone. So if I entered that 3PM Frankfurt meeting when I was in New York, I would have entered it as 9AM.

2. You can set your local time to whatever you want. You can disable the option to retrieve your time and time-zone information from you cell carrier and just enter that information yourself.

I noticed another peculiarity of the calendar is that the calendar will not automatically account for planned time shifts relating to moving to daylight savings time and vice versa. This is an important consideration if you are in standard time but you are creating an event (using the N900 calendar) that falls in daylight time, and vice versa.

So, again it looks like you have to be cognizant of the "here and now" nature of the calendar: not only do you have to make sure you convert the time to your current time zone when you enter events that take place in other time zones, you also have to convert if you are entering an event further into the future if it falls in a different daylight/standard period.

Alternatively, for daylight/standard, I think it is safer to enter those future events in outlook or another application that does account for DST, and then sync it onto the n900. Those future events, will be an hour off in the N900 calendar, but I presume that they will eventually display the correct time once the N900 shifts to the new time period.