Travel, Time Zones, Calendars and Blackberry

So, just back from London for a job interview, (didn't get it), and this makes me think about time settings. Thanks to the darling man, I have become addicted to using the Blackberry together with google calendar. It works very well most of the time. But coming back, I noticed my London appointments had all shifted times, showing up at 3am or something weird.



Turns out, this is a normal feature of the Blackberry, which is that when you make a calendar entry, it will enter using the phone's currently set time, meaning that a 10am London meeting turns into 5am in NYC. (Well, depending on daylight savings time, but let's keep the simplest case and ignore that.) This makes perfect sense if you think about how the BB was designed - for business people. Business people who travel often have to call back for a conference call or whatnot, so it's important to keep that original "home office time" so that they realize that a call scheduled for 6am in NYC is going to be at their 11am in London. Ok, most of us don't start working at 6am, but you get the point.

Still with me? If you've gone to London, of course you experience 11am as your (now) local time, aside from jet lag of course, but need to be reminded properly of the home office time. If you keep this in mind, the fact that you originally had to manually change the time on the BB is completely obvious: you don't want to shift around any meetings that should be in the home office time if you've changed up your current local time. With current models, you can set the device time to be either from "Blackberry" or "Network," and the latter would automatically change the device time. (Note  that BB calendar keeps meetings at the original time zone entry, which is why they shift around when you change the device time zone.)

The downside to this strategy is that people think of time relative to themselves, rather than to the home office, so I always think it would be nice to have a setting that would also allow non-shifting appointment times. (Basically, if you could check a box and the calendar would display all your previous and future meetings in their original local times, so the 11am London meeting, followed by the 2pm NYC meeting on the next day don't get shifted by their time zone differences.)

Well, that's more useful for an individual than a company, but here's hoping. For now I can just look at my physical, honest to god, paper day planner, and that serves the same function. Writing things down in two places also helps to reduce errors. (Although given that I managed to write down the wrong train time for last weekend in my planner and didn't bother with the BB, this doesn't work if you don't actually do it.)

Note for computer programmers: this non-adjusted time would be exactly what is needed for good integration of tasks into the calendar.... this is already the case for the BB alarm clock. Why can't I have a setting for tasks "in time relative to me" as opposed to always having to specify a time zone?

So what does this mean? Well, for one thing, when setting non-local events on your BB, you want to pay attention to the time zones setting. Apparently google calendar doesn't do the shifting time zones thing well, but BB certainly does. Hey, it was made for business people after all. Then you can just sync to google calendar to have things show up on your computer, and non-local events will be adjusted for local time based on the time zone difference. It's no trouble to enter a different time zone for a particular event, but quick tip - if you're entering a bunch of different events that are in a different city, you could also change your BB time zone settings to that location and then change back when you're done entering events from your upcoming business trip or vacation. (Date/Time source must be set to "BB" and not "Network" for this to work.) Or, as I checked, you can also switch to a different time to check past events, as I did to see what time my London meetings actually were in London GMT. 

It seems that as opposed to this sensible strategy, google calendar tries to impose a single time zone, and may end up changing the times of your past events if you update the local time. For this reason, it may be best to stick with entering events just using the BB and then only using the desktop or browser interface to view details later. It seems that although you don't have the option to specify this this in google sync, when there are conflicts between google calendar online and the device, the BB wins. 

Despite these foibles with the google calendar interface, the BB and google sync work well. The brilliant thing about using the google sync is that it makes it possible to then set up another unlocked cell phone with an international SIM card and download all of your calendar entries using google sync once there. We have an older unlocked BB, and at least in the UK you can get data services easily, I think automatically, with a new SIM. The blackberry service is additional, and only available on some networks, like Orange. I managed with just the gmail app and data services--lots of google maps usage--while the dear man paid extra to use the BB email push and other services. While it can be annoying to carry two phones around, this is a lot less annoying than paying massive international roaming charges, particularly for data. In order to be reachable in emergencies, I turn data services on my US phone off but keep the network on. Be sure to check this carefully, especially if you have email/data push services.

Well, this one turned out a bit of a ramble, but I figured I'd throw in a bit more about unlocked cell phones while I was at it, because really, all of this is going to be pretty expensive if you just use your US phone, and not all of us have a company to pick up the phone bill.