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This is something that might be odd for people who have recently switched from a consumer phone to a BlackBerry. When you change times zones, your BlackBerry does not automatically change the time, even if you program your phone to update cell towers. No, you’ll continue to see everything in your home time. You can fix this manually, though. All you have to do is go to Options. From there, click “Date/Time.” The top option on that page will be time zone. Just click the text, and you’ll get an option for every time zone around the world. Select the correct one, and voila! You’re updated. However, this does cause an unintended issue.

Say you live in California. Next week, you’ve scheduled a meeting in New York for 1 p.m. local time. So the schedule is in your BlackBerry calendar, and you continue your week as normal. You fly out to NYC and lose three hours. Because you’re going to be there for a week, you use the above method to change your BlackBerry time zone.

In New York, you get your calendar update…at 4 p.m.! You know, three hours after your scheduled meeting. This is because when you update your BlackBerry’s time zone, so does your calendar update. This can be horribly frustrating, especially if you’re traveling. It’s basically a choice between leaving your BB on your home time, or changing your appointments once you arrive.

It doesn’t have to be that way, though. No, there is no patch or plugin that changes how this functions. And you’d think that after all these years that RIM would catch on to the agony this can potentially cause. But if you can remember how to enter your appointments, you should be fine.

The key, and the only real solution to this issue, is to enter all times as you would locally. So, taking our example of having your meeting in NYC at 1 p.m. When you enter that into your calendar — while you’re in Californa — you have to enter it in at your local time, which would be 10 a.m. That way, when you get to New York and you change your time zone, your meeting will slide to 1 p.m., and thus be correct.

It’s not easy, and it certainly requires you to remember to do this every time. But it can be a relatively easy habit to pick up. Because it’s either that, or 1) leaving your BB on local time, or 2) being reminded of your meetings at the wrong time.

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