Two brief items about time and my recently completed circumnavigation.
For years, my timepiece of choice has been the Citizen Skyhawk. It’s a solar-powered marvel, with only one flaw: its multiple city feature doesn’t accomodate the Indian time zone (IST=UTC+5:30). When I was at Hyderabad Airport last week, I stopped by a watch store and asked if, by any chance, Citizen now had a watch that could handle Indian time. They showed me a Navihawk: an earlier design, no longer sold in the USA ((Or at least not available through the Citizen store at Amazon.com.)), without solar power, but with full support for IST. ((Curiously, it still doesn’t support other half-hour zones, like Newfoundland, Tehran, or Adelaide.)) I bought one in a heartbeat: highly recommended for those who visit India regularly.
The Navihawk was a success; the iPhone less so. I disabled data roaming on my travels, for all the well-documented reasons; I also found that very few of the roaming carriers would send out the signal needed to automatically set the time. This shouldn’t have mattered: the iPhone allows you to set the date, time, and time zone by hand, so everything should just work. Unfortunately it doesn’t. Despite my best efforts, the “World Clock” and “Alarm” features of the Clock application were totally confused. I had planned to rely on the iPhone’s alarm function, and so I hadn’t bothered to pack a separate alarm clock. Eventually I worked out that the most reliable (but awkward) technique was to use the count-down “Timer”.
I’m really surprised at how buggy this part of the iPhone software is. I can only assume that Steve Jobs has never travelled abroad with his iPhone. Please fix it, Apple.