[ddeans]

My wife has the blackberry pearl, and I have the curve. Both of our phones are set to pull the time from the network, however both phones show a different time, by about 2 minutes. I was wondering if there was something tha I should do so that they are more accurate, or if thats just the way it works..

[jeffh]

Are you both with the same carrier? If you reboot both phones at the same time, do they show the same time at that point?

I don't know anything inherent in the two phones that would make them show different network times, other than being on different networks or possibly using different towers. I also don't know anything you can do to change it.

If you have a Verizon phone, you can try calling *22899 to refresh the PRL on both phones. I don't know if that will help the network time issue, but it's something you should do every few months at least.

It would be better to state your carrier's name rather than using an advertising slogan.

[ddeans]

We both use Verizon, and both phones are right next to each other and I did the *22899 and I took the batteries out and put them back in. Still off by 2 minutes. I will just leave it as it is, its not the end of the world. But thanks.

[Barry41561]

As per your opening point - that this comes up from new users who are 'dumbfounded' by their expensive new smartphone -- the reality is that the Treo's, running the Palm OS, do NOT have this issue. Yes, I agree that the Palm software was state-of-the-art in the year 2000, but it did permit the smartphone to update to the local TZ, without any complications.

As those of us who travel know - the BB DOES know the local time -- it simply 'refuses' to update the 'local' time to that TZ.

So -- what would be so horrible for the BB to simply update to the local time?

While I understand your point -- for those of us traveling both domestically and internationally, the current setup is unacceptable: It simply makes more work for the user (as an example - on a recent trip I traveled from NY to LA to London to Berlin to NY. The best that RIM could tell me was that I had to know each time zone I was traveling to. Sorry - but that's insane).

As a 'middle' ground -- why not give the user the option of letting the BB update to the local time? We'll figure the rest out....


*****************************
"Why doesn't my Blackberry update the time correctly when I travel across time zones?"

This question comes up once or twice a month, generally from a new user who is dumbfounded their expensive new smartphone can't do something their last three dumb phones did automatically. I'm offering this post to elaborate on the Blackberry FAQ, cited below, and to offer a real life example of how the Rim technique works. I hope it will clear up some of the confusion around this topic, and help new users get the most from their phone. Your comments are welcome. I'll be happy to correct any mistakes you find.

[nstockton]

Since this question comes up so frequently, isn't that a hint that Blackberry should make a change? I understand how it works, and hate it, and I don't think I'm alone. One of the easiest helpful changes would be to simply display 2 times on the front screen, the home time and the network time. To go a step further, every entry needs just 2 times, the home time and the local time. Does RIM have any plans at all to make any sort of change? Is there any add-on I could get to deal with this differently. Based on the way it works, I'm not going to make any manual setting changes to my blackberry when I fly to a different time zone. Sure, today's appointments might show as I want, but all my other appointments will not show properly. Having to make a manual change every time and then still have issues when looking at appointments in the calendar is not a good solution.

[jeffh]

I don't work for RIM, so I certainly can't speak to their future plans. I would be surprised if they changed how they handle time zones, simply because their method works and is consistent with their calendaring application. I'm not aware of any add-on that does it differently. I have heard nothing from the developer I mentioned earlier, since he told me he was moving the project to a back burner because the software hooks needed were not accessible.

It really is very simple. Enter your meetings in the correct time zone for the meeting location, and change your BlackBerry to the correct time zone when you arrive at that location. You will have to manually change the time zone, but if you put the meetings in correctly, you won't have any issues.

[Barry41561]

especially when syncing with Outlook.

I have little doubt that the BB is far more sophisticated than the Palm Treo 700 (there is no argument), but scheduling with the Palm was (is) easy. Synchronizing my Treo to my notebook was painless, regardless of where I was, or where I was going.

Jeff: If you would indulge me further (perhaps I'm just not fully understanding the 'work around'), can you please explain how you would go about scheduling (in Outlook) my recent trip, with appointments in NY / LA / London & Berlin. Also - please advise if I need to know the specific time zones that I'm traveling to, and whether I need to be aware of whether a country is using Daylight Savings or not.

My understanding from RIM was that I needed to know the actual GMT time of the city of my appointment in order to make a future appointment. Is that correct?

Again - thanks for your assistance here - but I tend to believe (from those I speak with) that there's significant disappointment in the marketplace with this aspect of the BB.

[jeffh]

especially when syncing with Outlook. ...
Jeff: If you would indulge me further (perhaps I'm just not fully understanding the 'work around'), can you please explain how you would go about scheduling (in Outlook) my recent trip, with appointments in NY / LA / London & Berlin. Also - please advise if I need to know the specific time zones that I'm traveling to, and whether I need to be aware of whether a country is using Daylight Savings or not.

My understanding from RIM was that I needed to know the actual GMT time of the city of my appointment in order to make a future appointment. Is that correct?

Again - thanks for your assistance here - but I tend to believe (from those I speak with) that there's significant disappointment in the marketplace with this aspect of the BB.

You are absolutely correct about the marketplace's opinion of how the BlackBerry handles time zones. I don't know anybody who likes it, or intuitively gets it the first time they see it. Outlook is a significant contributor to the problem, because it doesn't make explicit what time zone you are using, and doesn't make it easy to schedule meetings in other than the default time zone. Outlook 2003 can display two time zones. I use that feature. But it's not the same as having a time zone selector dropdown box. I've been told that Outlook 2007 handles time zones differently from 2003, but I don't have 2007.

Because of the problems with Outlook 2003, I would schedule meetings for your recent trip using the BlackBerry Calendar input screen instead of Outlook. There you have the needed time zone selector. For NY and LA, you know the time zones. London and Berlin are named choices on the dropdown selector, so those are easy, too. Had you been stopping in Paris and Antwerp, you would have had to know the time zones for those cities. There are a number of 3rd party apps that give that info. WorldMate is one that a lot of people use. The BlackBerry takes care of the DST adjustment for you.

Schedule your meetings using the BlackBerry calendar input screen. If you have a meeting at 1:00 pm in Berlin on Tuesday, October 14, enter it as 1:00pm and select the "Amsterdam, Berlin (GMT+1)" time zone. When you press save, the meeting will show up on your BlackBerry calendar as 7:00 am ET, assuming you have your BlackBerry time zone set to Eastern time. When you arrive in Berlin and change your time zone to Berlin time, the meeting will show as 1:00 pm. Schedule the London meeting the same way.

The problem with this approach is obvious. Say you want to print your agenda for the trip in advance, and have the meetings show in the correct local time. The only way I know to do this is to change the time zone and print the agenda for each locale. Hardly optimum. If you look ahead at your calendar at meetings in different time zones, the meeting times won't be in local time. But they will be correct as you travel to each location and set your time zone appropriately.

I hope this helps. RIM's method will always work, as long as you know the time zone of your meeting location and use it when you schedule the meeting, but it doesn't make looking ahead at your calendar easy.

[jbonnot03]

Outlook 2007 has the option of choosing time zones when inputting a new appointment. This should help sort of. It is just like what was mentioned above, you have to know the city or the correct + or - figure from GMT.

[jeffh]

Outlook 2007 has the option of choosing time zones when inputting a new appointment. This should help sort of. It is just like what was mentioned above, you have to know the city or the correct + or - figure from GMT.

Thanks for the info. Does 2007 give you a drop down time zone selector similar to the BlackBerry calendar input screen? Does it use city names for time zones like the BlackBerry does? If it integrated a Worldmate-like listing of the top 250 cities in the world with their time zones and DST info, that would go a long way toward alleviating the confusion when entering appointments.

What is also needed is the ability to look ahead and see the calendar in the time zone that will be in use on that day. RIM could implement that without changing the underlying relationship between the clock and the calendar.

[jbonnot03]

See the attached screenshot of Outlook 2007. It gives you a drop down box for both the beginning and the ending time zone.

[jeffh]

Thanks for the screen shot. That's terrific. It completely addresses my wish-list for appointment entry with multiple cities in each time zone. As long as RIM interfaces with it properly, that should solve the entry problem with Outlook.

[jbonnot03]

Not sure if the two talk right. I use Google Sync for my blackberry and outlook so the time zone doesn't make it across to my phone. Someone else will have to test this. Sorry.

[FusionCrackberry]

hi JeffH,

sorry mate but i'm struggling. could be that all the timezones are upside down downunder but we have just moved to daylight saving time. The phone was set to blackberry time (i'm on enterprise server so i don't sync manually at all) and so i manually updated the time - moving it forward by an hour. all the appointments in my 8120 were moved back an hour (including all birthdays adn all day events as per fools above).
so, i get on google and find you. re-set the time to network, checked the time zone (on the pearl and in outlook calendar it is set to GMT + 10, sydney - that's me!) and that's all cool. but the pearl actually then re-set itself to an hour earlier on the clock (the network time is still right). so i manually re-set the clock to the right time. appointments are still out by an hour. tried turning the pearl off & then on again. comes back on with time as i set it but still the meetings are out. have you got any ideas as to what's going on, please?

[jeffh]

hi JeffH,

sorry mate but i'm struggling. could be that all the timezones are upside down downunder but we have just moved to daylight saving time. The phone was set to blackberry time (i'm on enterprise server so i don't sync manually at all) and so i manually updated the time - moving it forward by an hour. all the appointments in my 8120 were moved back an hour (including all birthdays adn all day events as per fools above).
so, i get on google and find you. re-set the time to network, checked the time zone (on the pearl and in outlook calendar it is set to GMT + 10, sydney - that's me!) and that's all cool. but the pearl actually then re-set itself to an hour earlier on the clock (the network time is still right). so i manually re-set the clock to the right time. appointments are still out by an hour. tried turning the pearl off & then on again. comes back on with time as i set it but still the meetings are out. have you got any ideas as to what's going on, please?

I think your problem is the same as the one described by a Melbourne user a week ago. Here's his thread: http://forums.crackberry.com/f49/tim...s-again-80166/

The specific problem he reported involved a Desktop synch, which probably isn't your problem, since you don't synch, but it seems from his post that the DST definitions have changed in Australia recently and RIM's definitions have not been updated yet. I don't know when that will be. There might be a patch on Rim's website now. You could check. In the interim, his solution was to use Hobart time. Will that work for you?

Glad you found CrackBerry on Google. Welcome; there's a great community here that together can solve just about anything.

[FusionCrackberry]

hey Jeff,

thanks so much! it is as you said - time source is network and i selected Hobart GMT + 10 as opposed to Sydney GMT + 10 and bob's your uncle! it's all good! thanks for saving me from the ducks!

[jeffh]

Great! Glad to help. Credit to the guy last week as well. If he hadn't asked his question, I wouldn't have known about the DST rules changes in Australia. Welcome to the Forums!

[davnel78]

Jeff - thanks so much for this! Glad I did a search for it, since I just wondered the same thing today, as I just traveled cross country and was wondering why this was.

[jeffh]

For anyone reading this thread and wanting the technical details behind RIM's implementation of time zones, and how it could be done differently, see this very informative post by member royhiggs: http://forums.crackberry.com/f9/floa...achment-82537/

[puddles99]

This is such a helpful thread, thank you. Like others, I remain a bit baffled that my former "dumb" phones appear smarter than my curve when it comes to Time Zones, but at least I now understand why!

[bartaholic]

ok this explains how and why but this camper is still not happy, i moved over from the brick treo 700p which had no problmes with switching over to different time zones and it would leave your app times untouched.
i travel a lot by vehicle between time zones and states like northern Indiana is a dual zone, ct and et
im not as much concerned about my app times but ability to see in what time zone i am if driving trough and what is the local time,
its a pain in the **** that such a great phone has a such a design flaw,
can i disconnect the calendar from the clock?

[Spinny]

Well, fairly new Curve user, just had my first trans-TZ experience. Like every newbie, I was annoyed that my wife's RAZR reset itself and my BB did not, so I came here. As ever, CB is a font of great info.

My observation: so long as you use the TZ drop-down properly when you enter appointments, what's stopping the BB from auto-adjusting? Manual or auto mode for changing the local TZ, it amounts to the same thing, so why not allow auto adjust?

Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com

[jeffh]

ok this explains how and why but this camper is still not happy, i moved over from the brick treo 700p which had no problmes with switching over to different time zones and it would leave your app times untouched.
i travel a lot by vehicle between time zones and states like northern Indiana is a dual zone, ct and et
im not as much concerned about my app times but ability to see in what time zone i am if driving trough and what is the local time,
its a pain in the **** that such a great phone has a such a design flaw,
can i disconnect the calendar from the clock?

If you could disconnect the calendar from the clock, it would work like you expect, but it would be inconsistent, so there's no way to do it.

Well, fairly new Curve user, just had my first trans-TZ experience. Like every newbie, I was annoyed that my wife's RAZR reset itself and my BB did not, so I came here. As ever, CB is a font of great info.

My observation: so long as you use the TZ drop-down properly when you enter appointments, what's stopping the BB from auto-adjusting? Manual or auto mode for changing the local TZ, it amounts to the same thing, so why not allow auto adjust?

Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com

You're right of course. But auto adjust would mess up the calendar for all the folks who don't use it correctly. It seems in this case RIM went for a solution that's guaranteed to always work at the expense of convenience. There's also the issue that user royhiggs addresses in his post on 10/18/08. The way RIM handles time zones appears to preclude the possibility of auto adjusting. I don't know which is cause and which is effect. It could be they decided not to allow auto adjusting, and coded accordingly, or it could be they coded badly and as a result can't auto adjust without changing core code. I'm neither a software developer nor a RIM employee, so I can't say which (if either) is correct.

[Spinny]

That's fair enough. Thanks for the insights!

Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com

[schaidshaw02]

Awesome info as always. Just wish i woulda seen this before daylight savings messed me up lol.