I think it could be confusing for users to have the time change right from under them in one field. Perhaps it would be easier and less confusing to have the time with tenths of minutes in a separate field and show them both, making the calculated one read-only?
Your description of the problem is rather confusing. You want to conver from minutes to tenths of hours, right? And in your example, 12.44 is 12 hours, 44 minutes, and 12.8 is 12.8 hours, right?
If my understanding of the above is correct, you can calculate the value you want using this formula, assuming that users use . (dot) as the separator character:
ceiling((substring-before(time, '.') + substring-after(time, '.') div 60) * 10) div 10