iPhone gives Europe extra hour of sleep
Late to work this morning?
Forget those excuses about traffic jams and Halloween hangovers. You might be able to blame your iPhone.
Reports from Europe suggest a bug in the iPhone’s alarm app caused it not to adjust to Daylight Saving Time in that part of the world. Consequently, people in Europe were tweeting like crazy about waking up an hour late because of the apparent bug.
“A whole hour of peace and quiet in the office this morning without any iPhone users courtesy of Apple,” wrote a Twitter user named jamiei..
A user named garrettc wrote: “Daddy, do you remember where you were during the great iphone alarm calamity of 2010?” “No son, I was asleep”
Daylight Saving Time went into effect on Sunday in Europe, causing clocks to reset to an hour earlier. Reports suggest recurring iPhone alarms did not adjust to the new time. The time change does not go into effect until November 7 in the United States and no alarm-clock problems have been reported here.
Earlier in October, websites in Australia reported an iPhone software bug caused alarms to go off an hour earlier than expected.
The blog Engadget writes about a way to trick your alarm into going off at the correct time:
“Deleting and re-adding the alarms will NOT fix the issue. We’ve now tested a number of scenarios under iOS 4.1 for ourselves. The bug appears when using a repeating alarm for anything other than ‘every day.’ So for example, your alarm will go off an hour late if it’s set for ‘weekdays’ or ‘weekends’ or every ‘Monday.’ The following alarms are not affected by the bug:
“An alarm that doesn’t repeat (repeat set to ‘never’)
An alarm set to repeat ‘every day'”
The blog TheNextWeb says Apple should announce a software fix:
“We imagine Apple engineers will be working overtime to get this fixed before daylight saving time hits the USA next weekend.”
Apple did not immediately respond to a CNN request for comment.
The glitch highlights what appears to be a trend of people using their phones to wake themselves up in the morning — instead of using traditional alarm clocks.
That may not come as a surprise since people seem to use their phones to do almost everything these days — from browsing the Web to planning pregnancy.
Coincidentally, the tech blog Mashable on Sunday posted a list of five of the best (non-Apple) alarm clock apps for the iPhone.
If you’re in the U.S., it might be smart to visit that page before Sunday.
