First time sync bugs?

[ERicJ]

Submitted this to CompanionLink tech support to b/c I'm not sure where it should go really:

"First time sync from PalmDesktop6 to Epic4G. I noticed several problems so far. Some contacts had birthdays in which the year was correct on the PalmDesktop, but in DJO they have had the year mysteriously changed to 1970. Also, there are contacts on the PalmDesktop that do not appear in DJO's contacts nor the native Android contacts. Please advise."

Anyone else experience problems like this?

[DJOCTO]

Eric,

We don't recommend synchronizing to Android Calendar. It is best to turn that setting off. Android Calendar cannot hold all the data from Outlook. Your recurring settings and Birthdays are limited to only what Android can handle. If you synchronize to Android Calendar, your recurring events could be deleted or changed because of the limitations of Android Calendar.

Use DejaCalendar instead. It was written to match Outlook capabilities.

[ERicJ]

We don't recommend synchronizing to Android Calendar. It is best to turn that setting off. Android Calendar cannot hold all the data from Outlook. Your recurring settings and Birthdays are limited to only what Android can handle. If you synchronize to Android Calendar, your recurring events could be deleted or changed because of the limitations of Android Calendar.

Use DejaCalendar instead. It was written to match Outlook capabilities.

If it matters, I've never touched Outlook... ever. Only using the standard Palm desktop application.

After a bit more debug: all birthday years before 1970 were converted to 1970; birthday years after 1970 remained correct.

[DJOCTO]

It's the same with Palm Desktop. Not all recurring types can be handled by Android. When you send Palm Calendar data to the Android Calendar, it becomes a "lowest common denominator" game. So what the Android Calendar can't handle will be deleted in Palm.

The Solution is to use DejaCalendar (our product) and not to send the data to Android Calendar or Google Calendar.

[ERicJ]

I haven't even started looking at the Calendar yet. All these problems are coming from CONTACTS. The birthday year thing is a bug in the birthday year field of the contacts.

I had another bug appear this weekend. I got a new txtmsg from the number belonging to Patrick Johnson. But the name that was displayed was "Patrick Smith". I don't even have a contact for Patrick Smith! When I pulled up the contact data for Patrick Johnson it all appeared correct. There were no other linked contacts in it either. I had to edit a field in the contact and save it back to get the correct name (Johnson) to show up in the native txtmsg application.

[ERicJ]

I've figured out the 1970 birthdays problem. That was an effect of PalmDesktop v6. The PalmDesktop v6 calendar doesn't support events before 1970. And it looks like since contact's birthdays show up as calendar events in the desktop calender that it changes the contact's birthday to 1970 on the desktop. The Palm Handheld is still correct. That contacts problem does not exist on PalmDesktop v4. I've done a sync with PalmDesktop v4 overwriting the DJO data and so far the DJO contacts and DJO calendar look to be very accurate with respect to PalmDesktop and PalmHandheld.

I've checked the contacts that were missing before and they are all present now in both DJO contacts and native Android contacts.

I'm now almost certain that the missing contacts were a result of syncing with Google Contacts.

Google Contacts are a mess when you've got people tagged in Picasaweb albums. It creates contacts for every person you have tagged... old dead relatives, 2-year old nieces and nephews, etc.. I'd really like a way to delete all the Google Contacts and for a download from Android to Google Contacts. Argh.