Samsung Galaxy S peculiarities #01 - Calendar

A week ago I bought my first smart phone. Although I am an avid Apple laptop/desktop user, I’ve grown unhappy with Apple’s attitude to iPhone/iOS developers and its condescending attitude to users in general (we know what’s good for you). As a developer I can see myself developing mobile apps some time in the future and do not want to be subjected to Apple’s whims. Hence a choice for the Android mobile platform was the only logical one.

The phone I chose is one of the more popular Android based phones these days: a Samsung Galaxy S. It has gotten rave reviews online and I have to agree with them; it simply is a great phone! I can definitely recommend it.

However people tend to point out that Android is not as polished as iOS. Supposedly it suffers from little inconsistencies that impact the usability of the platform to a certain extend. When I was researching the Android platform and phones I found it difficult to find detailed information about these little things. It seemed only fair to highlight these issues to allow others to make a well informed decision.

Another reason for putting these Android/Samsung peculiarities on my blog is that I could not find an easy way to report these issues to Samsung. Hopefully these peculiarities do find their way to Samsung so that they can address them in future updates.

One other note before I address the first peculiarity. Most mobile phone makers extend the Android platform with their own applications, widgets and UI tweaks. I have not used the Android platform long enough to be able to determine what is stock Android functionality and what is Samsung’s. As such what I will describe might not be applicable to all Android based phones. It might not even be applicable to other Samsung Android models.

Calendar

For my calendaring needs I am using Google Calendar. Android based phones allow for easy syncing with Google Services and the phone’s Calendar application is no exception. Newly created events in Google Calendar automatically end up on my phone and vice versa. However for events created on the Samsung Galaxy S you do have to be careful to select the appropriate calendar to create them in.

The Samsung Galaxy S has a calendar, called “My calendar” that is local to the phone. It will not be synced with Google Calendar and as such its best not used if keeping all your events in sync between your phone and Google Calendar is what you are after. Fortunately that seems easy; the Calendar Settings have an option to turn it off:

“My Calendar” is the local calendar, the others, with letter ‘g’ in a square box, are my Google Calendar ones. Please note that “My calendar” is turned off.

Creating a new event

When creating a new event I would have expected that one of the enabled calendars would be picked as the default one. Logically that would have been the first one in the list: “Personal”. This is what happened instead:

It used the calendar that I turned off in my Calendar Settings! How weird is that?

Tapping on the right arrow shows that turned off calendar is still listed as the default calendar for new events:

This is not only a peculiarity, it is clearly a bug and an annoying one at that.

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