Hello all, and thank you in advance for your help. I, like a significant number of others am having some issues with the clock/time on my android phone. I have been searching for a couple weeks and have not found anythign else that really addresses the problem I am having.
The phone is a Samsung Galaxy Centura from Straight Talk, connecting through Verizon towers.
For whatever reason, the clock on my phone is occasionally being set to a time exactly 5 hour earlier than the correct time for my time zone (currently eastern daylight time). In fact, this is what the phone displayed when it was first activated in late June. I manually changed the time, and ever since, it seems to want to go back to that incorrect time, 5 hour early.
As of yet, I cannot tie the time change to any specific time or to any action I am taking. Sometime it will go several days without doing it, and other times it will do it multiple times in one day. I have tried every combination of settings for "Automatic date & time" and "Automatic time zone," but none of those setting being on or off seem to prevent this issue from happening.
At one point, while researching this issue, I recall reading that Android primarly uses GPS sattelites to synchronize its time. I disabled the GPS services, and that seemed to keep the time correct for a longer period of time, but it did eventually reset itself to the incorrect time. I do use the GPS functionality, and would prefer to keep it on, especially if this is not really a fix for the problem.
I also though for a time that it was a tower issue, that I was getting the wrong time from the tower it was connected to. However, I find that unlikely as my wife has the exact same phone. She has actually experienced this issue once, but only once, not the numerous times that I have. I also have a Blackberry through work that I would assume is connected on the same tower, and I have never had such a problem on that device.
I have also considered that it might be some app causing the problem, but my understanding is that root access is required to change the time, and I have not rooted my phone. In any case I have installed watchdog in case a rogue app is causing this, and it has not reported anything.
Additional deails:
- The time zone setting has never changed. Even when time is 5 hour early, the phone still shows that it is on Eastern time.
- Turning the phone off then back on corrects the time
- Turning airplane mode on then off does not correct the time.
- Android version: 4.0.4
- Model Number: SCH-S738C
- Kernel version: 3.0.8-1207620