As with all new technologies in my life, there's always a period of transition. A chunk of time when you have to unlearn what you're used to and re-learn things with new devices that are expected to be better than the original. I mentioned some of what I expected to have to give up - and new things that popped up that were unexpected - in my last iPhone post so the Concessions list has a foundation already... but this is different.

This is a bug: there's a cap to how big a Calendar item's body can be yet you'd never know about it until you hit the problem.

I have a Calendar item in Outlook that has 6903 characters. I didn't create it but it's in my Calendar just the same. Not an unreasonable size anyway. The bug here is what happens when this item is Sync'd to the iPhone: nothing. iTunes completely ignores it and your Calendar on the iPhone has open time for this slot. It doesn't put in a stub or truncated item for you. It doesn't tell you there was a problem. No error, no warning, no sync log file to investigate. And what's maddening: no choice on how to handle it. Ideally there would be a "Sync items larger than blah" option. Apple didn't include it and odds are it would be explained as "that's a feature! Who likes error messages? It just works!"

Enter Concession #1: watching Calendar items sync and make sure the items are smaller than at least 6K of text or else I miss meetings.

Update #1 - Seems I'm not the first to have this problem either: http://timheuer.com

Same thing happened when trying to Switch to OSX... you do something that doesn't work like it should, so you say lemme find another app or a workaround. Three months in you realize that you've spent a shitload of cash on software (lot less freeware for Mac) and you've conceded a bunch of features yet you don't know why you did it. It's a slippery slope... the entry level features are all well done but once you get in deeper and you start to hit limits or advanced work you quickly realize that one is just as complicated as the other, be it OSX vs Windows or iPhone vs Windows Mobile.

Should be interesting to see if the same thing happens here... the AirSync support very well may dictate how long I keep this device.

And the journey continues...