Travelling

[Travelling]

Hi

Here is something that has been bugging me for a while. Would be really grateful if someone can throw some light on this for me.

I own both a Huawei P20 Lite phone and a Huawei MediaPad M5 tablet. I travel a lot and understand that the phone adjusts its timezone from the time info it gets from the cellular network it is connected to. The tablet does not connect to any cellular network so cannot adjust its timezone. My guess is that it uses the internet to adjust its date and time if the setting is on automatic. Would be so simple to use the IP or lat/long to estimate the timezone and I just can't understand why this is not built into Android! Are they any apps that can do this?

I build a Tasker task for getting the timezone from lat/long but I cannot set the device timezone as the "Set Timezone" action appears red and cannot be selected. I guess I need to root my tablet for this to work. Do I need to reflash my device for to root it? Will I then have to reinstall everything?

Regrds

Patrick

 

[svim]

The Location function typically relies up three things -- GPS, local cellular towers, and local IP addressing. GPS being the most precise, with cellular requiring at least three local towers for some kind of triangulation to work, and IP addressing being the loosest as they can only define certain regional locations.
Time is adjusted on our devices by periodically syncing up with various online time servers, like time.nist.gov, and there are countless numbers of them but they all reference to the UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) atomic clock in Greenwich, England.
The two are inter-related but not dependent on each other -- i.e. you can use a VPN to be connected via WiFi to a different country but still have the local time being where you actually are.
Since your tablet doesn't have cellular connectivity, it of course can't use cellular towers so that leave GPS and IP addressing. If you typically leave GPS off than if you at least use it with WiFi connectivity at some point it will sync itself with a predetermined time server. No clue as to the time interval your Huawei tablet is set to sync with a public time server though. Could be hourly, could be daily, or more.

As for rooting your device, be sure you're prepared in advance for its drawbacks too. Yes it allows you more access to system-level tasks but it's not the magic fix that a lot of people tout it is. Rooting gives you the ability to delve into the operating system a lot deeper, but it does not also automatically give you the knowledge.
https://phandroid.com/2019/02/23/5-reasons-why-you-shouldnt-root-your-android-smartphone/
Root your device because you have specific reasons to. In your example of the Set Time Zone being greyed out in the Settings menu, rooting your device won't just magically enable that setting for you. You'll need to learn specific CLI commands, along with what system files to edit. Just as an example, the relevant time server info will be listed in /system/etc/gps.conf