Welcome to Daylight Saving Time, Deluxe 2007 Version. There were lots of warnings, a few dooms-day scenarios and, as best I can tell, a lot of folks for whom the day passed with nothing more traumatic than a late entry to Sunday morning services. I thought I was in good shape since I made sure that my systems were patched and visited various vendor sites to see what they said about DST and their products. I only made one real mistake: I trusted Cingular.

I have a Samsung Blackjack phone from Cingular. On the whole, it’s a fine cell phone, though I’ll admit that I often miss the Treo I was using in my last job. Anyway, I went out to the Cingular support site and was told that I didn’t need to do anything to the Blackjack–it was ready for the shift to Daylight Saving Time. With my other systems patched, I felt pretty good. Silly me.

When I got up yesterday morning I had to quckly head out to the airport, so I didn’t look at the phone for a couple of hours. When I did, I noticed that the Blackjack was still on standard time. I turned it off on the plane, and when I turned it back on at the mid-point of the trip I expected the time to have reset. Nope. Turning the phone off and traveling to California didn’t help, either. Rats.

I finally did some searches and found that Microsoft had released a Special Daylight Saving Patch for the Blackjack. I downloaded the patch, applied it to the phone, and the world was once again in temporal balance.

So what’s the lesson here? I suppose it’s that you shouldn’t trust a single participant in a multi-vendor system to tell you all you need to know. In my case, there are three vendors who have portions of my phone; Cingular, Samsung, and Microsoft are each participants. My mistake was assuming that Cingular would have a handle on the operating system issues. It would be nice if the company that directly took your money for a product could be counted on to properly support it, but that may be asking too much in today’s world. Congratulations, pilgrim–you’re on your own. The times, they are a-changing, and it’s up to you to make sure all your systems keep up.

Categories: Mobile, Embedded, Consumer Technology