iPhone 3GS: Contacts sync fine but Birthdays are all one day later?

Hi,

I've noticed that problem too, and unfortunately that bug has been there as long as I can remember, dating back to the 1.x firmware days. As you suggest, I think it's causes by incorrect timezone handling for timezones that are +12/13 as NZ is.

The problem occurs when a change in a contact on the computer causes the contact to be synced from computer to phone - in that case the date on the phone is incremented by one day on the phone only. It doesn't seem to happen in the reverse - if you edit the contact on the phone, and it syncs back to the computer, the date remains correct on the computer...

This problem is so annoying that I've given up using the birthday field in the contact list - I now just create a notes field and type their birthday manually into that - that's the only way I can be sure the address will be correct.

It also affects all day calendar entries - causing them to appear one day later than they should be, only on the phone. Because of this I avoid using all day calendar events as well.

I can only suggest that you contact Apple and file a bug report, as I did some 6 months ago....

Regards,
Simon

PS I was in NZ when I was having this issue - I haven't tested to see whether it still occurs now I'm living in the UK in GMT+0, but I assume it won't happen to me now...(I still don't trust it though so I will keep birthdays in the notes field...)

Regards,
Simon

hi,

My contacts had been correct on my powermac g5 and on the MobileMe website, but were appearing 1 day later on my 2G iphone. But I think this may have been resolved in iphone 3.1

Yesterday I was updating one of my contact address details within MobileMe using safari and I noticed that when the contact had been pushed/updated to my iphone, the birthday had corrected itself - even though I did not change the birthday field.

I did a test by editing another of my contacts in safari and sure enough, when the changed contact was pushed to my iphone he had his correct birthday too.

I have now gone through all my mobile contacts in safari and pressed the edit button on each (without changing anything) then pressed save. All the contacts i have 'edited' in this way have had their correct birthdays pushed to my iphone.

So now all my birthdays match up in Address Book on my mac, within MobileMe and now in the Contacts app on my iPhone.

i hope this helps....
J

This is a strange bug, and I suspect it has to do with 10.6 &/or 3.1.

I've witnessed various date synchronisation issues with the NZ time zone, over several versions of the OS. Price you pay for being on the leading edge I guess.

Similar to the other posters, what I found is that contacts in address book will synchronise between computers and to MobileMe correctly, but the iPhone is a day ahead (applies to both birthdays and anniversaries). A date entered on the iPhone will be a day behind on the other computers. So this implies that the iPhone is at fault.

However, if you put a date in on the MobileMe web interface, it will go through correctly on both iPhone and computers. But as soon as you edit on the computer again, the date shifts out on the phone.

One interesting thing I did notice is that after making the change on the web, I had a sync conflict come up once. It said that the web version and the local details were different – however it was reporting the local version being a day ahead, even though the Address Book still showed it being correct.

It was as if the local database was a day out from the Address Book display, indicating a fault with the computer OS. I'm now wondering what would happen if the whole local sync database was trashed on the computer?

Additional bit of information: the problem happens whether synchronised via MobileMe or iTunes.

Final result…

I don't know what the problem is but I'm still glad I live in NZ 😉

I had the same problem after I returned from travelling overseas and found that the solution was to turn off the 'Time Zone Support' facility which is in the 'Mail, Contacts, Calendars' section of Settings. This quite useful facility comes into play when you travel to another time zone and want to see appointment times in the appropriate local time.

I have the same issue although I don't use mobile me.

Depending on whether I update the birthday dates on my iPhone or my macbook pro I can't get it to sync correctly. I end up being either one day behind or one day ahead depending on which unit I have synced from. I prefer my phone to be correct so I have removed the birthday fields from my contacts on my macbook. The calendars are correct on both iPhone & mac. Quite annoying really seeing as we are paying a premium price for this product.

Thanks
C

Exactly the same problem here. I've seen it through various version of 10.5 and now 10.6 as well as multiple versions of the iphone OS.

Nothing I do seems to correct the problem.

Again, I'm in the NZ timezone which seems to be a common element to this problem.

This has to be the way in which the iPhone is interpreting dates and times.

I have been syncing my iPhone 3gs OS3.1 for a few weeks with no problems at all (well, outlook notes syncing just doesn't work, but that's for another forum post) All of my contacts and calendar entries have been syncing across fine and then yesterday daylight savings started in Sydney (we went from GMT+10 to GMT+11) and every one of my all-day calendar entries has moved back one day.

When re-sync'd with Outlook the entries in Outlook still display OK, but the entries on the phone still get converted to one day before.

The iPhone must interpret an all day event starting time as 12:00hrs on the date (eg 04/10/09) and then when the clocks rolled forward the sync is subtracting 1hr from the calendar entries, therefore making the start time and date above, 11:00pm 03/10/09. Blackberry/RIM got this wrong for years in Australia every time Daylight savings kicked in. I'm suprised apple haven't fixed this yet after 3 major software revisions.

Just discovered that I'm not alone with this changing birthdate issue when changing from Eastern time zone to Pacific on both Mac and iPhone, then attempting to sync the two.
Now all birthdays are a day late on both units in both the calendar and contacts programs on both.
I'm thinking of switching both back to Eastern time and forgetting about the time zone settings. Anyone klnow if this will work or will I have to manually edit all entries? If I edit them, how can I be sure they won't get messed up again?