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.

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.

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 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

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.

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.

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.