Mobile phones are taking over a lot of aspects of our daily lives. Thus, we’re investing hundreds of dollars to improve the quality of our lives by relying on smart devices.
The question is, are those devices really smart? Europe switched from Daylight Savings Time to Standard Time and lo and behold, if you had an Apple iPhone, the phone woke you up one hour later than you were supposed to. Luckily, November 1 is All Saints Day [also refered to Day of the Dead in some countries] and it’s a holiday in majority of western countries. However, one of my friends, editor in an F1 magazine missed his flight from due to this small "error". Apple’s reaction? "We’ll fix it in a software update."
However, Apple wasn’t the only company to blame for Daylight Savings Time whoops. Samsung’ recently released Bada operating system experienced a SNAFU of its own. At 3AM Korean Standard Time, the clock application switched from 4PM CET to 3PM CET. At the same time, phone continued to show 16:00 i.e. network time.
This showed a clear disconnect between network time and phone time, meaning that internal software does not syncronize with the network time when network time is available, and pushes through "Made in Korea" and works on Korean time? even though South Koreans don’t follow Daylight Savings Time scheme.
Samsung S8500 Bada Phone: Operator time: 4:09PM. Phone says: 3:09PM
As you might imagine, the alarm clock application is tied to the clock application, not the Network Time and the S8500 Wave phone actually raised the alarm as told to by the internal application – one hour ahead. However, after the time switched in Europe, the alarm rang normally in the morning.
But, if you had the need for an alarm for a meeting or just the regular wakey wakey between 3PM and 3AM CET, you’d be falsely informed – as the alarm would ring one hour ahead.
Now, we truly wonder what are mobile developers thinking when they create operating systems as advanced as this. Is it normal that a phone running with more computing power than a standard desktop in 1995 – can’t have a built-in table of timezones for all countries?
