Time Zone Change

Unfortunately, it won't do that automatically.
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Time travel with the assistance of a gps.... new show idea, just head in the right direction and you can arrive at your destination an hour before you even left the house.

Miss Poi

I totally agree!!! How can it not do that!!! My phone can do it.

Your phone gets its information from individual cell towers, that are set to display the time on your phone in the time zone the cell tower resides in. GPS units get their time information from the satellites, and that is in UTC, aka Greenwich Mean Time, and their software operates on that time. The time displayed is a user-dependent setting, kind of like your watch. For a GPS unit to have the necessary programming, it would have to have a lot more memory to accommodate all the oddities of time-zone boundaries, and the exceptions to time zones...like for instance - the state of Arizona does not observe DST, but, Native American Reservations do. The cost of the memory and additional programming would make the units cost quite a bit more than they do.

Plus, it would most likely cause user problems with routing. Suppose you were traveling from EDT to CDT and route on the GPSr said that you were going to arrive at 3pm. Would the average user take that to mean 3pm Eastern or 3pm Central? If it meant Central, would the user be able to, in their mind, understand and take into consideration that this trip was going to take 4 hours instead of 3 hours (for example) and plan their time correctly. There are lots more possibilities for problems this way which would likely result in unhappy customers.

Try to think of the clock display on your GPSr in the same way as you think of the time on a simple watch. Don't compare it to the time on your cell phone which (as has been posted) is a completely different thing.
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Besides the additional memory and programming that Keith referred to, the response on a GPS device would slow down having to constantly check to see if it needs to update the time on your device. Too often, mine recalculates a route and tells me to turn just as I am about to enter an intersection. With the added overhead of checking time, I'd be half a block past the turn and it would have to start over.

Devices like these often leave out a lot of the bells and whistles in order to get a rapid response time.

Ok I can see the difference now. Thanks.

I posed the same question on another thread. I trruly believe its something the unit should be capable of doing.

http://www.poi-factory.com/node/2299