Tuesday, October 21, 2008

iPhone displays only 1500 characters from a calendar note

I get off my plane, confidently open my iPhone Calendar to check where I'm staying and ... the note is truncated!

WTF?!

I retrieved the data from my Gmail calendar (no truncation there!). So what's the deal?

It was surprisingly hard to find out about this iPhone Calendar.app limitation. An Apple discussion forum post by Everett Marshall was the only source I found:
Apple - Support - Discussions - Outlook calendar entries get truncated ...

... To address your specific issue (and I have the same frustration with travel itins being cutoff ...gggggrrrrrrrr!!!!!!!!!!) the ENTIRE note is actually on the phone. You just can't see it.

What you can do is select 'Edit' for the note in question. Then touch the Note to enter Edit mode. The entire note is there.

I guess someone at Apple has decided if 140 characters is good enough for Twitter, 1,500 characters is more than enough for an iPhone user's Note field.

Fix it Apple. This is basic stuff. Oh...And while you're at it why not make phone numbers clickable in the note field....
Sometimes Apple's decisions make me want to bonk my head on the wall. Palm did better than this 10 years ago!

I confirmed that if you try to edit the note text, you get a small window you can scroll through. I don't know what the field limitation really is; Outlook will go to 32,000 characters. I suspect the iPhone limit is less than that.

I suspect the limit applies to all Apple iPhone Notes but I can't confirm that.

I'll add this to my growing list of surprising things about the iPhone (along with more detail on the dry finger problem!).

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