# Why was my phone too dumb to handle daylight saving time?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-was-my-phone-too-dumb-to-handle-daylight-saving-time/440820>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [March 10, 2008, 9:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-was-my-phone-too-dumb-to-handle-daylight-saving-time/440820 "2008-03-10T09:15:32Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![HeyHomie](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/heyhomie/32/207_2.png) [@HeyHomie](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HeyHomie)\
**Post date:** [March 16, 2008, 2:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-was-my-phone-too-dumb-to-handle-daylight-saving-time/440820/21 "2008-03-16T02:41:58Z")

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For the record, my XM receiver _still_ hasn’t recognized the switch over to DST, and is reading an hour early.

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**Author:** ![groo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/ecd19e/32.png) [@groo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/groo)\
**Post date:** [March 16, 2008, 12:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-was-my-phone-too-dumb-to-handle-daylight-saving-time/440820/22 "2008-03-16T12:57:00Z")

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I assume that the phone was periodically checking the time, as all cellphones do. The problem was what it was choosing to tell you. I can’t speak for all cellphones, but just about every computing platform keeps track of time in GMT. When there’s a need to tell **you** what the time is, it adds or subtracts the appropriate number to give you the time in your time zone. That was the part that hadn’t been updated.

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