Automatic TimeZone Switching for BlackBerry

The Motorola Q does it, the Treo does it, the Razr does it... and yet NO BlackBerry does it. What am I talking about? The seemingly obvious and basic cellular phone function of automatically switching the time zone for you while you travel.

This does not require internal GPS, as the other phones do not have/need it and yet have gotten their location / time zone directly from the network they attach to for years.

Now I have seen multiple discussions on the forums complaining/questioning about this feature, where "switchers" to BlackBerry just can't understand how to enable this feature on their BlackBerry... it is such an obvious feature that they think they are stupid and don't know how to get it to work, rather than the ridiculous notion that maybe this feature does not exist on the BlackBerry!

Arguments about setting the Date/Time source to Network vs. BlackBerry, the use of GPS, GPS not required, A-GPS vs internal GPS, it is just an endless circular conversation I have seen over and over with little resolution.

There have been justifications floated around that since the BlackBerry is a multifunction device, not just a phone, that the calendar items would be off whenever you traveled to a new time zone, causing mass confusion. For this reason they left it to the user to manually change the time zone.

This makes little sense to me, in that it might cause me mass confusion to have my calendar appointment times off from the local time I am in! In any case, RIM could even leave it to the user by default, but at least put it there as an option to turn on.

My theory on this, using no background information at all, is that RIM simply does not trust the wireless carrier networks to provide an accurate time zone setting from their networks. If one of the carriers passes out bad time zone data and messes up someone's entire calendar then RIM would be blamed. That is just a theory on my part, but that fear does not necessitate leaving out even the *option* of enabling this feature on the device.

So at WES a few months back I came armed with a couple of questions I was going to get answers to... one of them being this issue. The people I talked to - who granted were not the go to handheld development people - did not express any sort of justification for leaving the functionality off. In fact, they expressed the idea that "Yeah, that makes sense, we should look into enabling a feature like that."

There must be a back story I am missing here, there must have been some conversation about this at some conference table at some time in the 5 years since the first BlackBerry phone was released. Can someone enlighten me... please?