Fellow MVP Jack Cook asked me to look into a problem he was seeing reported in the Windows Phone forums about the HTC HD2 birthday field. Basically, HTC’s Sense will not allow you to create a new contact or edit an existing contact’s birthday and set the year to anything before 1941. At first, I figured this had to be a mistake. I was pretty shocked to see that there was no mistake.
To test this, I created a new contact by the name of “MobileJaw” and set the birthday to 01/28/1921 – this is a real birthday in my actual contacts. Once the new contact had sync’ed to the phone, I browsed to the contact and selected “Menu / Edit Contact” option while viewing the contact details. Scroll down to the birthday and you can see that the value was transferred to the phone correctly. However, once you tap on the date field to edit the value, you are presented with a very nice looking window that allows you to easily dial in the correct date information. However, the year has now changed from 1921 to 1941.
This is clearly an interface limitation. It’s clear as day that the field allows values prior to 1941. HTC has made a design decision to limit the years presented in the scrolling dial to 1941 to 2040. While I understand that they need to have some limit, I think it’s crazy to expect that the people owning this phone would not have any contacts born before 1941. Why not set the limit as 1900 to 2040. That to me seems like a much safer bet. Oh, and just in case you’re wondering, the issue isn’t just with birthday, it’s also a problem with anniversary.
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