Urrggh, its that time of the year again when daylight savings kicks in. Unfortunately my very clever N73 has the wrong change over dates so for the next few weeks it will think that New Zealand is at GMT+12 instead of GMT+13 !

For most people this will not be a problem, you just set clock an hour early, but if you synchronise your phone with PC (for instance with Outlook) then all your appointments will be an hour out.

Nokia did put out a patch at the start of last year but unfortunately it still gets the NZ switch over wrong :(

I tried taking the installer for the patch apart and it seems to just copy a new timzone database (a .dbz) file onto the phone but try as I might I cannot find any documentation on this file, so a quick hack looks to be out of the question.

In the mean time I have found that the best way to solve the problem is set the timezone for the phone to be Tonga which is GMT+13. This solves any synchronisation issues and in a few weeks you can set the timezone back to Auckland.

Its really annoying that Nokia doesn’t just issue a new patch, I suppose they just don’t care about us in little ol New Zealand (sniff) but since this issue will affect all their high-end phones (N70, N73, N95 etc) which are used a lot by business users you would think they would get off their butts and do something. Sigh.