March 11th, 2007
Cellular phones botch DST
It's Sunday morning, March 11, 2007, on the first morning of the new DST (Daylight Saving Time), and I just noticed the time on my cell phone is ahead one hour. No I don't mean it's ahead one hour from yesterday's time–it's ahead one hour by today's official time. So instead of saying 7:45 AM, it says it's 8:45 AM. On my wife's cell phone, the time didn't adjust at all, and it still says it's 6:45 AM. Both cell phones are on Sprint.
[Update 8:40 AM - I found an update for Palm for my Treo 650. I had to e-mail my cell phone this link, which points directly to the patch, and download it from the phone. Then, I had to go to applications and run the DSTPatch. Then, I had to reboot the phone and reconnect to the cell network to get the right time. I haven't a clue what I'm supposed to do for my wife's Samsung A900 phone yet, and I'm still searching on the Web for answers. This is something that will probably affect every American's life, since we're not just talking about computers, and here's who they can thank. Y2K wasn't even this bad, and you didn't have to adjust your cell phones because of it.]
[Update 5:30 PM - The Samsung A900 cell phone now appears to have autoupdated.]
Ironically, we've been focusing on Microsoft's DST issues, but I haven't seen any yet. My Vista machine made the transition properly, as did my company laptop. Outlook is working correctly and none of my calendar items is messed up, which means the company Exchange server made the transition correctly. So far, all my computers are working fine, but if any of you are having DST issues, let me know in the talkback.
George Ou is Technical Director of ZDNet. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
