Android device time set to 6th January 1980 [close

Question

I have a Huawei Ideos android phone. Sometimes the clock is set to 6th January 1980 automatically. I have tried to reproduce this issue by trying the following cases :

1) Discharging the phone battery completely. 2) Removing the battery from phone without shutting down the mobile. 3) Doing a manual shutdown even if battery is extremely low.

The problem never occurs in case 3 which actually makes sense. But in the other two cases the time sometimes gets set to 6th January 1980 but it does not happen always. Also this behaviour may occur in some other cases that I may not have thought of. What is the reason for such behaviour?

Now if the time is set to 6th January 1980 I tried to see how it can be reset automatically.

1) If you do a proper manual shutdown again the time becomes proper 2) If you enable the use network time option then it gets reset.

Could someone please explain to me the reason for this behavior? Also what is the significance of this particular date?

Answer 1

January 6th 1980 was the first day of the whole GPS Epoch wich cell phones use to automatically set the date and time. I'm guessing it uses that date as a default or maybe that's the first date it can grab when its looking for satellites as that was the first day they were "turned on".