iPhone Calendar Limits & 2.1

[sstober]

When I originally got the iPhone 3G, I synced my calendar, email and contacts over the air to my Exchange-like mail server (Kerio). All worked well except my Calendar. My Outlook calendar goes back to 1997 and I've always been able to sync to my Palm/Treos (directly). However, not only did it take over an hour for the initial sync over the air, but when opening up my calendar, it would take 20 - 30 seconds or more to become active. Then if I wanted to do anything on the calendar, I'd get very long unusable delays. When I re-initialized the iPhone and just synced the last month of data, all was well and has been ever since. I'm wondering, with the new 2.1 upgrade, will the delay go away as it did with Contacts or is there some limitation with the amount of scheduled events allowable on the iPhone?

[TEG]

Any phone would choke under 10 years of scheduling. You should only sync 2-6 weeks at anytime, using the setting on the iPhone or in iTunes. I also think that Palm automatically discards older scheduled items.

TEG

[sstober]

No the Treo can quickly access any event that I select since I have been using Outlook - no issues whatsoever. Treo also has a great search tool. It's helpful for people who want to ask questions about 'when did I first meet so and so'; or for professionals who have clients. With the TREO or Palm Pilot you can type in someone's name into search and ALL of the info related to all the times that you've had a meeting with that person comes up. Really useful and hopefully iPhone will get there. By the way, from a computer perspective 10 years of asci type calendar data is nothing.

[doodads]

There's a simple solution. Take back/sell your iPhone and use your Treo.

[sstober]

Hey DooDads: what we're trying to do here is get the iPhone up to speed so that it is the BEST PDA available. Apple is slowly making changes to get it there but we want it to do at least what BlackBerry and Treos do and with the added features of the iPhone it will be the best. Remember, part of why we're here is to send Apple a message about what is needed.

[CocoaPuffs]

Hey DooDads: what we're trying to do here is get the iPhone up to speed so that it is the BEST PDA available. Apple is slowly making changes to get it there but we want it to do at least what BlackBerry and Treos do and with the added features of the iPhone it will be the best. Remember, part of why we're here is to send Apple a message about what is needed.
It's nearly impossible to make everyone happy. Being able to sync 10 years worth of calendar events is definitely low on most people's priority, and there is little incentive in terms of cost benefit for Apple to do EVERYTHING.

Jack of all trade is master of none. Apple won't be here if they didn't understand that.

[ucfgrad93]

Have to agree with others on this one, trim some of the stuff out of your calendar, 10 years seems a bit excessive.

[Ntombi]

I also have 11 years' worth of calendar data from my first Palm Pilot forward.

What I did was set iCal to keep the older data, but only sync the last three years (1000 days) with the iPhone. That way, I still have the info on my desktop calendar, but it doesn't bog down the iPhone.

Can you do that with MobileMe?

[mavis]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 3G (16GB, 2.1 PWNed): Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5F136 Safari/525.20)

Any phone would choke under 10 years of scheduling. You should only sync 2-6 weeks at anytime, using the setting on the iPhone or in iTunes. I also think that Palm automatically discards older scheduled items.

TEG

Two to six weeks?? Wow.

I got my Mac about a year ago and started using iCal then - I've got a year's worth on my iPhone (all MobileMe'd) and it doesn't lag at all. Two weeks would do me no good at all!

[TEG]

I was just using it as an example. My iPhone currently keeps 2 months worth of scheduling, because I'm using exchange. However, when I go back to school and loose my access to exchange, I'll go back to iCal, which used to sync all the way back to the beginning, 2005, without choking.

TEG

[sstober]

Ntombi: You said that you enabled the iphone to sync for 1,000 days. How do you do that? The only options that I can see on Mail Days to Sync (on the iphone is: 1Day, 3 Days, 1Week, 2Weeks or 1 Month). I sync with Outlook using an exchange server to my iphone and there doesn't seem to be any way to limit the number of days to sync on Outlook.

[Niiro13]

Ntombi: You said that you enabled the iphone to sync for 1,000 days. How do you do that? The only options that I can see on Mail Days to Sync (on the iphone is: 1Day, 3 Days, 1Week, 2Weeks or 1 Month). I sync with Outlook using an exchange server to my iphone and there doesn't seem to be any way to limit the number of days to sync on Outlook.

I think they were referring to manual sync...of course that'd make stuff like invites useless, since you'd have to manually sync your iPhone to your computer in order to get new events off the Exchange server.

I doubt that Apple will optimize the iPhone's calendar anytime soon. If Copy/Paste is considered a lower priority (than faster backups), I doubt faster calendars will be even remotely high on Apple's list.

[sstober]

I think you're right Niiro. I'm thinking that Steve Jobs has a grand master plan for future releases of iPhone's that will introduce various generations to the consumer. For instance, I think there will be a new iPhone within a year which will have many of the things that we do not have on our existing units. The next generation will probably have video and cut and paste functions. My thoughts are that there will be an additional button on the side of the phone that will be used for cut and paste and possibly other functions to get away from the inadvertent enabling of other functions on the page when cutting and pasting. I think that global find will be in that new version as will a more robust calendar. So for suckers like me who would dole out hundreds of dollars for the next generation iPhone, Stevie-baby has me in his sights!

[wenglish]

... If Copy/Paste is considered a lower priority (than faster backups), I doubt faster calendars will be even remotely high on Apple's list.

I'd even be happy (well, maybe less grumpy) if "usable" calendar was on their list. The iPhone calendar is a joke (try searching for an appointment). Coupled with the inability to handle tasks, this is why I still lug a Dell Axim X51v around.

[sstober]

I agree; the Contacts is also pretty useless for Search. I used to use the notes on a contact for remembering a person. I might have placed in the note section of the contact: "....met him at the Siggraph conference..." Then, if I wanted to remember who was that guy that I met at Siggraph, I would type in "Siggraph" into the global find feature of my Treo, or any calendar for that matter and the guys name would pop up instantly. The iPhone cannot do that very very simple thing. Sometimes I still have to refer to my Treo for things like that.....it's a shame that such a fantastic piece of hardware lacks basic PDA functionality.