Why would the clock on my cell phone be off by 10 minutes? I have another cell phone from a different carrier and it is correct.
What is the brand and model? Some phones, like blackberry’s don’t get their time from the carrier as a default, but rely on the user to set the time.
In fact in my experience most phones require you to set the time yourself. Mine does have the option to automatically set it (presumably from the phone network), but it doesn’t actually work.
On my cellphone, I can have it use the automatic time setter from the service supplier, or I can set it myself and not use the service supplier. It functions better by setting it myself. Keeps good time that way.
Well, my phone is a Samsung something or other. It does get its time updated by the carrier.
There is a setting for ‘Automatic Time Update’ and it was set to activate. I set it to deactivate and then back to activate. I was prompted to re=boot the phone and when it came back on, the time was correct. I guess Microsoft wrote the OS…
This is all surprising. Cell phones keep track of the time of day to within something like a millisecond, as I understand, so they can pass channels back and forth between different conversations and still carry them properly. How they use that to update the display might vary, but it’s hard to imagine a scenario where they would either be off by ten minutes, or where they would give users the option to set the time manually.
Some detail here is wildly wrong…
Maybe, but from personal experience one needs to explicitly query the network in order to get the current time. I use an embedded GSM module in a product, and the only way I was able to get the time is to unregister and re-register the modem with the network. When is registers, the time is emitted as a “WIND 15” string like so:
My mobile phone actually loses time to the extent that I have to reset it every couple of months or I start being late for things.
I have the Google Nexus One which is one of the best smartphones available, and it allows you to set the time manually. In fact, I noticed this morning that my time was off by exactly one hour slow. That has happened once before, but went away after a few minutes. It stayed for several hours today, even after 2-3 phone calls, so I set it to manual.
Is your carrier Verizon?
The display time needs to be more flexible than the phone’s internal clock that it uses to process calls. There are plenty of good reasons for wanting to set the display time yourself and I have not had a phone where this has not been an option.
My cellphone synchronizes to the time sent by the tower exactly. It never drifts, but sometimes when it can’t get a signal, it jumps ahead or behind an hour. Since it’s always an hour, my theory is it is somehow related to an attempted adjustment for daylight saving time.