Submitted by Bob Bhatnagar on
Keep a close watch on your iPhone alarms this weekend if you depend on your smartphone to wake you up on Monday morning. Once again it's time to fall back this weekend, as US clocks must be set an hour earlier at 2 AM Sunday. Standard Time should be set automatically on your iPhone, however a bug in the alarm clock software could wreak havoc with repeating alarms.
These alarms won't recognize the time change and will go off precisely one hour late. The bug has already caught people off guard in Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Apple is aware of the issue, and the company plans to issue a fix in the iOS 4.2 update. In the meantime, they have issued a support document for the problem.
Luckily the fix for this problem is simple. To make sure existing alarms go off at the correct time, set the repeat interval on these alarms to Never. After the time change goes through on the morning of Sunday, November 7 you can set your alarms back to Repeat as desired. An Apple spokesperson told CNN that users should set new one-time alarms for Monday morning just to be sure.
To edit the Repeat settings of an alarm, open the Clock app. Touch the Edit button in the upper left corner of the screen. Touch the alarm you want to modify. Navigate to Repeat and choose the repeat frequency for the alarm. Creating a new alarm that doesn't repeat is simple. Touch the + button in the upper right hand corner to create a non-repeating alarm from scratch.
After Standard Time takes effect, you may have to delete and re-create your repeating alarms if they don't work properly. iOS 4.2 is due for release any day now, and will fix the alarm issue before next spring's leap forward into Daylight Savings Time.
Comments
Anonymous replied on Permalink
Doesn't work - I had set a new one time alarm and it went off an hour early. So much for the fix.
Anonymous replied on Permalink
The fix does not work....unless perhaps you read this article before the time change and had a chance to delete all your repeating alarms. I deleted all alarms and added new ones after the time change. Only the non-repeat alarms worked. Any alarms that had a repeat (like a wake-up alarm for all weekdays) does not work. But then again, the article does not say that this was a fix for repeat alarms; it simply says to set your alarms as single occurrence.
Anonymous replied on Permalink
Apple knew about this on November 3rd according to support article. They should have let us know before 7:45 AM when my 6:45 AM alarm went off!!! Why did they not put a pop-up message in the iTunes Store warning us that were would be late for work Monday morning? Apple really failed on this one.