Where’d My Google Calendars Go on the Palm Pre?

By James Kendrick | Monday, July 20, 2009 | 2:38 PM CT | 21 comments |
Pre blank calendar

Pre blank calendar

I am working away in the beautiful hills near Carmel, Calif., and it’s a wonderful day. I need to get ready for a meeting that is starting in…oh dear, I just looked at my Palm Pre and didn’t see any calendar entries. I have many calendar entries in my Google Calendars, so why aren’t they displaying on the Palm Pre?

I depend on my calendar to make sure I am where I’m supposed to be, and my Google Calendar has been syncing and displaying fine on the Pre since I got it. Yesterday that ended with the calendars on the Pre displaying completely blank as demonstrated in the screen capture on the right. The settings are still properly set, the calendars just won’t display. I have performed numerous manual sync operations, which should make sure the Pre is working with Google Calendar and that seems to be working just fine. No matter what I do the Pre will no longer display the calendar items.

I have checked around the web and can’t find anyone else reporting a similar problem. Remember that my Pre displayed my Google Calendars just fine for weeks and then stopped displaying anything at all. Given the lack of others reporting the same problem I just deleted the Google Calendar account on the Pre. I figured I would then add it again, which would force a completely new sync from scratch.

Something weird happened when I deleted the Google account on the Pre. After getting the notification that the account had been deleted, for a split second the daily calendar showed all the calendar events that were no doubt on the Pre, just not displaying. They were only there for a second and then they disappeared, never to appear again. I verified the Google account was duly deleted and then I added it again. It went without a hitch, and performed a complete sync with Google Calendar.

The problem is my calendar events are still not displaying on the Pre. I am at a loss at this point as everything seems to be working as it always has, the calendars are just blank. Has anyone out there had all their Google Calendars stop displaying on the Pre? How did you get them back? It looks like a hard reset may be required at this point, something I hate to do.

Comments (21)

  • The same situation has happened 2 or 3 times on my iPhone …calendar and contacts vaporized…all info resynched in a couple of hours. I firmly believe it is a Google issue.

    Icarlin — 2:46 PM on July 20, 2009 Reply

  • think like a debugger.
    You claimed that the data is on the handset. So the problem might be the load of personalization data that you have on board.
    Try removing some staff out from other apps that store personalization items locally on your handset. It might work then.

    Just a thought :)
    Tal

    tal — 2:51 PM on July 20, 2009 Reply

    • I had this problem when I just got my Palm Pre. I spent 1.5 hours on the phone with Sprint tech. I provided the tech with my Google account password and he _WAS_ able to duplicate same issue on his Pre. Then he reported this problem to Palm for review. That was last I heard.

      _ THEORY _

      I think that this problem occurs when Google Calendar gets corrupted or is not 100% compatible with API. Some recurring events might cause this. I think Palm needs to work together with Google to fix this.

      _ WORKAROUND _

      Probably not what you want to hear.. the quick fix is to manually recreate calendar events.

      Alternate workaround is to export the google calendar to outlook or mozilla firebird, delete primary google calendar and then re-import events back. This might fix it.

      Good Luck.

      TheObserver — 8:40 PM on July 20, 2009 Reply

  • I’m sure you’ve checked this already, but did you make sure that everything is still there on your Google Calendar?

    I’ve had problems in the past with Google Sync for Blackberry where something like this happens, and the blank calendar on the phone ends up overwriting my Google Calendar.

    Nate — 3:06 PM on July 20, 2009 Reply

  • I had a similar problem when I first got my Pre.
    To solve it I had to delete my Google account, then soft reset. Then bring in my Google Calendar again. Everything has worked since then.

    Tye — 3:49 PM on July 20, 2009 Reply

  • I had this problem on WinMo (HTC Touch) device as well.
    Usually a soft reset did the trick.

    Eric — 4:10 PM on July 20, 2009 Reply

  • I had similar issues. Items were showing up in the monthly view but not in the day or weekly view.

    When deleting a calendar in google, it would still show up in the Pre, even after removing the google calendar connection and adding it back.

    There were other issues as well.

    I did a partial erase and added the google cal back.

    There’s a thread on Calendar issues here:
    http://forums.palm.com/palm/board/message?board.id=Synergy&thread.id=1668&view=by_date_ascending&page=9

    It’s a shame the Calendar app isn’t all that great and buggy at the same time.

    Rodfather — 4:17 PM on July 20, 2009 Reply

  • Had those problems with iPhone and Apple’s me.com when they launched OTA sync. Which forced me to switch to Google Calendar with Nuevasync and when they got overloaded switched to Google’s own sync. Haven’t had an issue for weeks.

    banker4:42 PM on July 20, 2009 Reply

  • I just had some items on my Pre calendar disappear immediately after using FlightView to add a flight to my calendar. My calendar trip event had disappeared on my Pre but remained on my Google calendar. There may be a bug with FlightView and the Pre calendar. Fortunately, when I did a soft reset of the Pre after having canceled the FlightView calendar function, my trip is now back on my Pre calendar. If you have added any trips to your calendar with FlightView, try selecting each of these and then rebooting the Pre. Hope this is of help.

    Jack Greene — 5:12 PM on July 20, 2009 Reply

  • UPDATE: Having palm.com remotely wipe my Pre and rebuild it has fixed the calendar issue. It did a backup and restore of all apps so I lost very little in the process.

    One thing I did lose which is annoying is all my browser bookmarks.

    Once it came back up my calendar events displayed properly, although adjusted to the local time zone. I found an easy way to adjust that which I’ll share in a tip later.

    James Kendrick, jkOnTheRun5:39 PM on July 20, 2009 Reply

    • I have the same problem now and I did not change timezones.

      How did you do this? Did you just go to the Palm website and under support select manage my device, log in, and then hit Erase Data. It makes me nervous because nothing is mentioned about the rebuild step.

      Chad Hamilton — 10:05 AM on September 11, 2009 Reply

  • I had this happen to me on my WinMo Sprint Mogul, except they got deleted from both Google Calendar and my phone. This happened several times and then I eventually gave up syncing with Google Calendar. Now I have a Blackberry Curve 8330 and it’s happened twice. No more syncing for me.

    Damian Esteves6:05 PM on July 20, 2009 Reply

  • Interesting and ironic. I’m on the same trip and wouldn’t you know I had the same issue appear when I landed in CA? I had the Pre in Airplane mode for several hours during my flights and when I turned off Airplane mode, my Google Calendar data was gone. Same exact issue. I wonder if using the network time zone settings had anything to do with this. And I’ll be curious to see if it happens again after our return flights…

    Kevin C. Tofel, jkOnTheRun7:40 PM on July 20, 2009 Reply

  • Hi:

    I had this same issue from day 1 with my Pre & G-Cal — did you also notice that you can not add events by clicking on the Pre calendar when this issue erupts?

    I had it fixed at one point (reset Pre & create new G-Cal from scratch) but then it returned.

    I was also told by Palm TS that this is a known issue with no ETA for resolution — it’s a real drag!

    geekabilly — 8:45 AM on July 21, 2009 Reply

  • I don’t have my Google calendar disappear, I have the entire calendar app fail to load any calendar, be it exchange or Google. So I restarted the phone and opened up the calendar app again and all was fine. Sounds like a memory leak somewhere to me.

    SeanBlader — 7:53 PM on July 22, 2009 Reply

  • I have had this EXACT problem twice now. I have used the Palm site to completely erase the phone and reset all the data, and the calendar is still blank. The first time this happened, the reset fixed it….this time no luck. I’m bummed!

    Lucy — 11:18 PM on September 8, 2009 Reply

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