Help Grrrrr: DST Issue (Calendar is simply junk, part one)

[bern_viking]

Hello everybody

So, this Sunday, October 30th, almost all of Europe switched from DST to "Winter Time", clocks were set back one hour, you got more time in bed and all that.

And my Hero HTC has made a mess of reccuring events in its calendar.

I have two events on Mondays that started in October and go on until January, one from 0800 to 1200, the other 1300-1700. They were entered during DST, and Outlook manages to keep them at the correct hour. I sync with the HTC Sync application.

Not so the Heros Calendar, it has shifted every event from Nov. 1st to one hour earlier, 0700-1100 and 1200-1600. They stay correctly in Outlook.

As far as i can see, the timezone in my Hero and Outlook is set correctly to the same: UTC+1. In my Hero, there is no setting "DST on/off" (that I have managed to find).

I find this extremely bothersome and completely unacceptable for a calendar application in 2010. We've had DST for some years, Google, maybe you should realise that. Now I have to double check appointments and events in my calendar to see if they are offset. It *seems* only to affect those that are reccurring and go over the time change date, but who knows?

I'd like to know if anyone out there has a solution, a workaround, or if anybody else has experienced the same.

Thanks and Cheers

S.

(oh yeah, part 2 and following may be coming soon...)

 

[rhippler]

I had the same exact problem with my blackberry syncing with outlook. wonder if there is a link. Only way to fix it was to delete and reenter the bad events. I still find the odd entry that spans two days. Seems that it only messed up the ones created on my phone or was it the other way around. Do you let windows manage DST or do you manually change it? I manually changed it and that turned out to be the root of my problem.

 

[ennologgers]

exactly the same problem with HTC desire.
I did remove all the calendar data on the desire rebooted and synced again with HTC Sync. Still the same problem with the recurrent events.

 

[roadrun]

I also had the same problem with my htc desire running Android 2.2 icw Microsoft Outlook. After spending a lot of time looking for the cause, if looks like I found a solution. I installed dejaoffice and synced it with the Android calendar. Dejaoffice also updates the Android agenda (what is exactly done, I do not know). After the update, all recurring appointments crossing dst are on the right time again (phone is in sync again with Outlook). Because I want to be sure that this was solving the problem, I cleared the phone's agenda storage, removed dejaoffice and did a resync. All recurring appointments crossing dst were 1 hour behind, but after installation of dejaoffice and a sync with the Android agenda, the appointments were on the right time again. I also synced back with Outlook and the appointments were still on the right time (also in Outlook). So it looks like dejaoffice corrects the Android agenda. This means that the correct information is synced to the phone and it looks like there is a bug in theandroid calendar tool. I am happy that I found a solution without having to update all my recurring appointments. I disabled the reminders in dejaoffice and only use this app now for correcting the data.

 

[bern_viking]

roadrun thanks, that sounds very promising...
With what application do you sync dejaoffice?

I have also found a kind of solution:

Yesterday my PC dowloaded an update of HTC Sync. It was one of those "oh noes, whatever will happen now" situations. Well, I sync and my first reaction was:
oh noes: a almost daily recurring event (started before DST) had lost all the exceptions (i.e. the days the alarm shouldnt ring). So, I went into Outlook, removed the "offending" days and resync'ed.

Ok, the event takes place at 2100, and since DST-change it had been warning me at 2000. Yesterday the alarm came.... 2100!

Today i changed some other recurring events in Outlook (just added a character so that sync would have to change it), sync'ed it and... it is correct on the android's calendar!

I can't say if its because of the syncing after the DST change or if the Sync update has corrected this. As usual, you are not told these things...

Slightly happier now, still a lot to grumble about calendar-wise.

Thanks and Cheers

 

[roadrun]

In the menu of dejaoffice, there is an option 'read Android data'. Selecting this does the job. It does not only read the data, but apparently also update the Android calendar data. Why, I don't know, but it corrects the time, so I am happy.

regards, roadrun