Having the correct time on your phone is obviously useful. If you’ve gone on holiday, or work in a different time zone, you may have noticed that even with the time set to adjust automatically, it can take a while to catch up. This guide will walk you through the process of changing the time on your phone manually.
The time settings can be found in the Settings app, under Settings > General > Date & Time. There are four settings that can be configured. The first setting is a toggle between a 12- and 24-hour clock.
The second setting is “Set Automatically”. If this is enabled your phone will use your GPS location to automatically change your clock when you go to a different time zone and for daylight savings. If this setting is enabled, it can sometimes take time a while for the time to update. This can cause issues as you may not know exactly when the time has updated which can cause confusion.
When “Set Automatically” is enabled, the time zone should be automatically set. If this is working correctly, a city name should be shown on the right-hand side of the “Time Zone” bar.
If there is no city name listed on the right-hand side, you need to ensure that location services can be used to set the time. To do this go to Settings > Privacy > Location Services > System Services and ensure that “Setting Time Zone” is set to “On”.
If you’ve got “Set Automatically” disabled, you can manually configure the time zone by tapping on “Time Zone”. Here you can select a city and country to sync the time to. Not all cities are on the list so you may have to choose a nearby city. Just make sure that the city is in the same time zone as you – if necessary, Google can help you figure it out!
If “Set Automatically” is disabled, you’ll see a date and time selection bar under the time zone field. If you tap on the date you can then precisely configure the date and time down to the minute.
Tip: The manual time, when set, assumes that the minute you chose just started – so it will be a full 60 seconds before it changes from 1:28 to 1:29 for example. Consider this if you really want your clock to be spot on!
