duplicate Birthdays calendar created after iOS 4 upgrade on iPhone 3G

I have the exact same problem on my 3G iPhone after the iOS4 upgrade. The Calendar is also a lot slower.

I believe the Birthdays calendar under the 'Other' section is created by the iOS4 update and shows birthdays of your iPhone contacts. To have only 1 birthday calendar (which is the 'Other' Birthdays calendar) on your iPhone, remove the Birthdays calendar in iCal from General settings or if you want to keep the Birthdays calendar in iCal, deselect 'Birthdays' when syncing with iTunes. Another option is to have 2 Birthdays calendars but select only 1 on the iPhone. I don't think the 'Other' Birthdays calendar can be removed from the iPhone as of now.

I noticed the same problem on my iPod Touch right after updating it to iOS4. On the iPod Touch, I saw duplicate birthdays, though I did not on my MacBook in iCal.

Aside from getting three people at Apple Care who either (1) didn't know how to address my question, (2) who said they're look into it and call me back but didn't, (3) who put me on hold and passed me on to another rep; I finally got a fourth (who said he was a Sr. Advisor) and who tried to explain to me why this was such a great new feature. He said I could add birthdays on the iPod Touch, and this new category would let me view or hide them.

It seems to me that there is no advantage whatsoever to this Other: Birthdays calendar option. Here's why...

I added a contact on my iPod Touch: Fred Flintstone, with a birthday of June 24, 1990. In order to make his birthday visible on my iPod Touch, I must have the Other: Birthdays category checked.

But when I sync my iPod with iTunes, the new contact from the iPod Touch is added to the Address Book; and then, because iCal is pulling birthdays in from the Address Book, and is then being sync'd through iTunes, Fred Flintstone's birthday now shows up twice on my iPod Touch. If I uncheck the From My Mac: Birthdays, none of the birthdays I added in Address Book will show up.

So one must either (1) enter all their birthdays in Address Book on the Mac and uncheck Other: Birthdays, or (2) enter all their birthdays into the iPod Touch and uncheck From My Mac: Birthdays in order not to have any duplicates. I can't figure out any other way for it to make sense without duplicates showing up. If there's some trick, they guy who told me he was a Sr. Advisor sure didn't know it. I also asked him if I could go back the the former OS version. Of course I could not.

Seems to me, some people at Apple didn't think this one through. So I've decided not to add any birthdays on my iPod Touch and to disable the Other: Birthdays calendar.

I also have the same problem. Having a separate birthday calendar makes absolutely no sense to me, since in iOS 4 the birthday calendar from MobileMe is already synced automatically.
So are my contacts, which automatically updates my cloud birthday calendar...
I hope Apple will fix this in 4.1!

Well...Here is what I suggest and by no means it is the only solution but I am happy with it. Just make sure you have the birthdays for those contacts entered in the address book. Then go ahead and delete every birthday calendar you have and any birthday event you have entered in any other calendar. Then sync your computer with mobileme with the option of replacing only calendar info on mobileme with calendar info on your computer's ical.
That's it. Any birthday info you enter from now on would be automatically entered in iCal and also synced to your iphone.

<sigh> Yet another ill-conceived 'improvement' from Apple, dumped upon us with no warning and no explanation. Did it ever occur to anyone in Cupertino that some users might want to track birthdays -- perhaps those of friends' or family's kids -- without having to have a separate entry for each in the Address Book? Or to keep friends' birthdays and family birthdays on separate calendars?

I've been doing this easily by syncing with Google Calendars and Contacts but this new feature seemed to stamp all over it before I figured it out. At least thanks to this thread I now know what's going on and have disabled the newly created calendar in the iPod's Calendar app. It's not perfect (I want it gone not hidden!) but I guess it's as good as we can hope for.

To be honest I hardly use the iPod Calendar app (preferring Pocket Informant which thankfully doesn't go near the internal calendars) but I'm glad I spotted this issue and this thread now, because I do use the iPad Calendar app and it would have confused the heck out of me seeing all those duplicate birthdays when the larger device gets iOS4 later in the year.

Same problem here.

As I can understand, one calendar is from iCal, the other is from iPhone. The iPhone calendar is not shown on iCal, but the iCal calendar is shown on iPhone, so you see both.

I just turned off the view of the iCal Birthday Calendar on the iPhone, hoping on a update from Apple.

I have noticed the same thing. I do not have my iCal show the Birthdays calendar that pulls from Address Book, but I was instead using a calendar called "Birthdays" that I created in iCal on my Mac, and that shows up along with all the other "On My Mac" calendars on my iPhone calendar list. Nevertheless, the iPhone calendar list also shows the "Other - Birthdays" calendar, even though there are no listings in it. I can verify this by deselecting all the calendars on my iPhone except the "Others - Birthday" calendar, and going to the "List" view of that calendar, which then returns a "No Events" message. So it's really useless to me even to have the "Others - Birthday" calendar on my iPhone calendar list. All the birthdays that I keep track of are entered in iCal under the "Birthdays" calendar that I created myself. It's just an annoyance not to be able to delete it from the list of calendars on iPhone!

Same issue with me (but with new iPhone 4). These are orphaned calendars. I've tried all of the tricks posted and the calendar(s) under "Other" keep coming back. There should be a way to swipe/delete them within the phone.

Message was edited by: rjdude

Same problem here. Just to add bulk to the complaint.

i think ive found a solution to it, i guess it might be a bug(or i dont know what) after all.

what it used to be:
birthdays in ical --- checked. in itunes when syncing with iphone, under -info-, ive checked 'sync all calendars' which gives no option to select any calendar NOT to sync. for some reason after the sync, a duplicate of the birthdays appeared in the phone.

what ive done:
birthdays in ical --- checked. in itunes, select 'sync selected calendars' and i randomly picked calendars to sync. in the phone, birthdays are no longer displayed AT ALL, only the calendars ive selected to sync. now, go back to itunes, try syncing again but this time with 'sync all calendars'.

it worked for me, hope it does for you. you do not have to recreate a secondary calendar just to remind yourself of birthdays, and there is no way to delete birthdays that are keyed in in your address book, if you so choose to 'show birthdays' in ical.