Why date/time automatic adjustment didn't work? Recently I went to Italy and bought a pre-paid TIM chip to use while there, because it was much cheaper than the ridiculously high prices of Rogers' roaming.

However, something quite puzzling happened. Whenever I changed batteries (I don't recharge my phone, I change battery to a full one and put the other one to recharge on an external charger) I would lose my date/time, it would reset to 1/Jan/2000. Manually setting it worked, but it was a bit annoying.

I didn't understand why the "Automatic (Use network-provided values)" setting didn't work. I was assuming that the phone would use NTP, and once being able to resolve DNS it should adjust the date/time, but it never did.

Doing some googling I found about NITZ, which apparently Rogers uses but Italian's TIM doesn't. My questions are:


is this the reason why automatic updates didn't work? 
is there a way of changing these configurations? (use NTP instead of NITZ for example, or some other configuration that would make the automatic update work, other than installing an app)
Most likely.
If your phone is rooted, you can install an app that will sync the clock using NTP. (Just search for NTP on Google Play: there are many such apps.)