I got my dad GB and myself new Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 phones.

Having been purchased on line via TradeMe, the Redmi phones came to me from Hong Kong. The manuals were in Chinese, who reads manuals anyway, but the adapter plug was of the New-Zealand kind, which is nice.

It is not often that one gets to configure two identical devices simultaneously. Only these weren’t identical, at least in this one System & Device setting. My phone prompted me to set the ‘Locale’ whereas GB’s phone asked for ‘Region’.

And neither Locale list nor Region list included New Zealand. My Locale list was a notch better as it has Australia in a group of countries that seemed to have been tacked on at the bottom of the list as an afterthought. For GB, I selected India. (The photo does not display Australia now that it has been selected.)

The time display on the Screensavers immediately changed to the times of the respective timezones. Had I made a costly mistake?

Naturally I looked at the Clock next, going straight to the ‘Edit system time’ item.

Under Time Zone settings, I needed  a to switch off ‘Automatic time zone’ and manually select the right time zone.

Thankfully, dear old Auckland featured in this list.

Great to see both phones displaying New Zealand time.

Moral of the story: Go ahead and buy Redmi Phones on line . . . I think.

Update on this post after four months: My dad’s phone has given him no issues. My phone has reset to GMT scores of times. It takes just a few seconds to go to the Clock’s Timezone settings and select New Zealand again. However one a couple of occasions, the reset happened when I was asleep; the alarm didn’t ring in the morning, of course.

New moral of the story: Go ahead and buy a Redmi phone. You have 50 % chance of being completely fine (if you follow my method as explained in this post). The other 50% must be careful not to rely on the alarm if you have to catch a plane.