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.

So how do I do the following:

1) turn off "automatic update

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

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

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.?

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.)

@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.

@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.

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.

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.

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.