Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Getting the time right the Sony Ericsson way

Why are most of the appointments in my phone one hour early compared to my mac, I wondered? I recently bought the Sony Ericsson W760i, dropped it - not very hard! - and got a repair under guarantee. In other words, it is a somewhat delicate phone that should be treated with caution, but otherwise it works rather well. So why are my appointments one hour off?

It's the daylight savings time, stupid, I hear you say! You are correct, daylight savings time was not configured correctly. I had configured Time and date, of course, but the phone demands something really peculiar from you to get the time right when syncronizing. If you have a recent Sony Ericsson model, this may apply to you too:

When you configure Time and date (under Menu - Settings - General), you are asked to select your timezone. I selected GMT+1, which is my timezone. Correct? No, you need to read the manual, which tells you that "if you select a city, My time zone also updates the time when daylight saving time changes." Copenhagen is the right answer. I chose Copenhagen as my time zone, and my appointments are now synchronized correctly.

The moral lesson might be - as we used to say when I worked in IT - RTFM: Read the f**cking manual. In this case it turned out to be the solution, but most manuals are so lousy it won't work. I think the real lesson is that user interface design is a major factor in my life, whether I like it or not. In cases such as this one, the user interface on my phone is a major time sink. There is very little I can do about it, except complain in a blog post. So there! Hope this helps someone and that Sony Ericsson listens.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Daylight saving in Sydney ends in just under 2 weeks so great timing to find your blog. After every daylight saving change, forward or back, it stuffs up all my birthdays which are listed as all day, then they go to 1am one day to 12.59am the following...erk.
This will be a good test.
Thanks again.
=)

6alax1an said...

Thank you for your comment - it's nice to know that your blog actually helps someone :o)

Unknown said...

...and it fully worked!!
Thanks.