[Galaxy S I9000 General] LiverpoolFCfan:
I had 2.2.1 on my phone and ActiveSync worked very well for Email, Contacts and Calendar. It would correctly 'ping' the folders, and go fetch updates when they happened.

Since moving to 2.3.3 with an official ROM (and any other ones I tested) I have always experienced an issue with the Calendar Sync portion of ActiveSync.

Email and Contacts still ping the Inbox and Contacts folders as expected but the Calendar has a mind of it's own.

Even though the Calendar folder is also pinged - it kicks off it's own independent 'Sync' request approximately every minute. And, what is worse is that after every one of these 'sync' requests it also initiates another ping on all folders Email, Contacts, and Calendar.

If I leave Calendar sync selected, multiple parallel ping requests end up clogging the server, and obviously this also has ramifications for data usage and battery draining.

I end up having to disable Calendar Sync for most of the time, only manually turning it on/off to sync any meetings I have set up or have accepted invitations to.

If you look at the attached screenshots, you can see that the date/time of the last update for Contacts is staying the same (09/08/2011 15:25) whereas the Calendar is updating every minute. This is happening even though nothing is changing on the Calendar on the server side.

Is this just me ? Or can other people please confirm that they are seeing the issue also.

EDIT: Well apparantly it wasn't just me - but there are very few people who run into this. Clearing the Email application data completely has cured the problem.

EDIT 23/08/2011:

The problem came back. And my original cure did not work. However, in troubleshooting, I realised that one of my colleagues phone's had also started doing the same - at the same time ! Tracing back I found that I had added a birthday field to one of our shared contacts (that both phones were synching) just before the issue started happening. So, having deleted/re-added/cleared data/etc. to no avail, I simply edited the contact on the server to remove the birthday from the contact and everything settled down again.

To verify the fix, I re-added a birthday record to another contact, and immediately the calendar sync started to spin again. I removed it, and immediately it settled down again.

(NOTE: This ties back to my original "fix" too as I had cleared out any suspect appointments/birthdays/anniversaries/etc during original troubleshooting, but the birthday fields were in non-"ping"ed Contact folders - so the contact records had not been refreshed on the phone until I had done a clear data and reloaded them.)

So, my suspicion is that when Android 2.3.3+ finds a birthday field on a contact it tries to add some kind of calendar event for it (I don't know where this event is, as it does not show up on the calendar as far as I can see.) Every time it asks the server to sync the calendar, it expects the server to have the same event - but when it doesn't find it, it asks for another Calendar sync again.

I also tried the same test with the Anniversary field, but that one did not appear to cause any issues.

Hopefully this will help others.

If anyone else is experiencing the issue, please report back if this fixes it for you.

And, if anyone has any ideas why the birthday field is breaking the sync, it would be great to get a full understanding.