Also, say if you go from California to Texas, phone is too dumb to roll the appt times back.
Mine isn't, assuming I wanted it to do that, which I usually don't. For example, if I've set my flight times at home I don't want them changing on me should I change timezones. What I mean is if I have a 2 PM return flight from Atlanta I enter that info at home as 2 PM. I wouldn't want to then be in New York and have my iPhone show the appt as 5 PM--and risk missing my flight. I can change this behavior on my iPhone should I so desire.
I configured my timezone setting here:
Settings-->General-->Date & Time
In the Calendar section I have Time Zone Support on. I also have correctly set my own timezone here (in my case Phoenix, as that was the closest city I could find in the same timezone). I think it is important to set the city to match the timezone on the computer to which you sync.
With the above configuration my appointments, as scheduled on my PC with Outlook, come over just fine. And they never change when I change timezones while carrying my iPhone (because I don't want them to).
If I did want appointments to change while I am moving through timezones I would merely turn Time Zone Support off. Then my appointment times change based on where I am located with my iPhone. This would be handy, say, for a weekly recurring 2 PM conference call. For something like that you probably do want the time of the appointment to change in order to match 2 PM wherever you entered the appointment (i.e., on your computer). I don't like appt times changing on me, so I leave Time Zone Support on.
So unless I am missing something the iPhone allows you to configure your timezone settings to match either preference. All it requires is that you properly configure the timezone on both your computer and on the iPhone. My only problem is the iPhone doesn't ask you to initially set its timezone (that I can recall). It just blindly uses Cupertino till you change it. For me that wasn't an issue, as during the summer months AZ is on the same time as CA (we don't observe DST). Had Apple been located in NY, and I not realized to change the timezone, my appointments would have all have moved 3 hours back.
--
Mike