One of the issues vexing many Windows Phone 8 users (try Googling the problem and you'll see what I mean) in recent months has been the fallible sync with Google Calendar using CavDAV - maybe you've seen it? You create an appointment on your Windows Phone in your Google Calendar and, on the next sync, the appointment shows up on Google (and on other synced devices) but timed for one hour before. This issue has been very tiresome for me personally but I've discovered a cure that works and I'd welcome feedback from others on whether it fixes Google Calendar for you too.

The very fact that the discrepancy is consistently one hour for events created on the phone and then viewed elsewhere tends to point to a time zone issue of some kind.

The first thing that Microsoft recommends is that you check that time and date and zone (and daylight saving time setting) are all correct on every platform and device being synced. These were fine for me. And the only time I ever hit the 'one hour out' issue was when creating events explicitly on a Windows Phone, pointing to something that was going wrong in the liason between the OS and Google's CalDAV servers.

However, while checking my Windows Phone's date+time settings, I did notice that next to my chosen time zone, 'Dublin, Edinburgh, Lisbon, London' were several other time zones all with the same official rating of 'UTC', i.e. any of these should give me the same current time. "I wonder...." I thought, and changed my time zone to '(UTC) Co-ordinated Universal Time'.

Backing out of settings, I tried creating a new appointment and... it appeared perfectly in Google Calendar, i.e. at exactly the right time. To double check, I switched back to the 'London' time zone and tried a new event - and it was out by an hour on Google again. Finally, I switched back to 'UTC' and tried again - new appointment times were now correct again!

Picking a different (less problematic) time zone that happens to be at the same physical 'time'; (right) after changing to vanilla 'UTC', creating an appointment in Windows Phone such as this...

.... results in the right timing making it through to Google Calendar!

It does seem, therefore, that there are underlying data errors in the time zone resources within Windows Phone 8. Here's hoping someone at Microsoft reads this and does some spot checks on all the settings for all the time zones pre-programmed into the OS.

In the meantime, if you too are hitting this major scheduling issue in Windows Phone, try changing to another named time zone within your region that has the same physical time - you may be as pleasantly surprised as me.

Comments welcome, I wonder how many other zones and regions are affected by this. Certainly some kind of config data issue in the time zone database would explain why those in charge in parts of the USA and in Finland haven't seen the issue themselves - their time 'zones' all work properly!