If you travel, you know what a godsend a Pocket PC can be. You can listen to music, read eBooks, send and receive e-mail, and more. Most importantly, you can carry all of your trip-related data—your addresses, phone numbers, travel itinerary, etc.—in one place, and access it quickly and easily. However, the "godsend" isn't perfect. There is a nasty little problem with, of all things, Calendar. We'll look at the exact nature of the problem later in the article, but first, let's try a quick experiment with a Pocket PC. (This applies to all Windows CE devices. The instructions below are given for a Pocket PC, and may be slightly different on a Palm-size or Handheld PC.)
What's the "problem" with Calendar?
Open Calendar and create a new appointment; let's say a late lunch, today, at 1:00 pm. Make sure you've saved the appointment by tapping "OK." Then, from the Start menu, tap "Settings," select the "Systems" tab, and tap on the "Clock" icon. This opens the Pocket PC's Clock utility.
Clock displays the "Home" and "Visiting" cities' time, date, and time zone. For this experiment, set your Visiting city to any other city with a different time zone. Use the pull-down list to do this. Tap "OK" and answer "Yes" when asked if you want to "Save changes to the clock settings?" Now, go back into Calendar and take a look at your Lunch appointment. Suddenly you're going to be eating lunch a lot earlier or later than you'd expected! What's going on here?
Pocket Outlook stores its appointments the same way as the desktop PC version of Outlook does—as offsets from Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). This way of storing appointments was designed primarily for the desktop PC versions of Outlook, and allows for the creation of "GMT-based" Calendar appointments that can be e-mailed to individuals in different time zones. For example, you can use the "Plan a Meeting" feature in Outlook 2000 to set up a conference call with individuals in different time zones across the U.S. When "Plan a Meeting" sends e-mail reminders to these individuals, the GMT-based appointments are automatically adjusted to the local time. The individual in Los Angeles is by his phone at 10 a.m., while the individual in New York awaits the call at 1 p.m.
This works well for situations in which people living in different parts of the world all have to be available for a conference call at the same moment. But it can be nothing but chaos for mobile professionals moving about from one time zone to another. An example will help clarify this.
Suppose a Pocket PC user who lives in California (Pacific Time Zone) is planning a business trip to New York City. He creates an appointment to remind him of his return flight, leaving from JFK International Airport at 8:00 a.m. (He's in California, on California time, when he creates this appointment.). The user travels to New York (Eastern Time Zone) and sets Clock on his Pocket PC to New York City time. Pocket Outlook "helpfully" changes all of New York appointments he set up while in California, setting them 3 hours ahead. So, the 8:00 AM "Catch my flight home" appointment created in California shows up as starting at 11:00 AM in New York. He misses his flight home (unless it's been delayed three hours, which is a possibility these days).
Solutions to the problem—free and commercial
There's nothing within Pocket Outlook that lets you turn off this "feature"; it's just the way Outlook works. However, there are some "work-arounds."
The first is to set your Pocket PC's "Clock" time to the city you'll be visiting, and then enter the appointment. For example, say you're in Los Angeles and you're traveling to New York City next week. You want to set up an appointment with a client in Manhattan, for 1 p.m. (Eastern Standard Time). The following assumes that you have Los Angeles set as your Home city, and New York set as your Visiting city in the Clock utility. Here's what you do:
- Open the Clock utility as described above
- Tap on and select the "Visiting" city option button.
- Tap on "OK." Answer "Yes" when asked if you want to "Save changes to the clock settings?"
- Open Calendar and set your appointment for 1 p.m.
- Go back to the Clock utility and select the "Home" city option button.
- Tap on "OK." Answer "Yes" when asked if you want to "Save changes to the clock settings?"
Printer-friendly version