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For your star alignment, use a mid-high power eyepiece (10-12mm or so) or reticle eyepiece (better) and make sure the star is centred in the FOV, you can use a trick like defocusing the star to a donut to make this easier. You will need a decent finder scope and have them accurately aligned to make this easier. The star alignment can be quite accurate with practice.
I have the GPS and rarely use it...I typically observe from the same few sites and have more or less memorised the coordinates at this point. You can use google maps or similar to zoom in on your location and determine your coordinates (just remember that many sites will give you the coordinates in decimal, not the Degrees:Minutes:Seconds required by the handset). The GPS doesn't really reduce the setup time as it can take a couple of minutes to lock on to the satellites.
When it comes to the time, you can set it to timezone 0 and enter the time as UTC to avoid having to convert local time.
To improve your user experience you can interface the handset with other software...a common one is to use a serial dongle such as SkyFi and the corresponding SkySafari app on a smart phone, tablet or computer, but other combinations exist.
The 8SE is a great portable combo IMO. Hope that helps...
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