One of the nice things about the N900 is the integrated address book. All contact details exist in the same place: telephone number, email address, SkyPe name, postal address to name but a few. You can also add auxiliary information too, like birthdays.
The calender scans the address book so that you get a nice little birthday cake icon on the day to show that it is someone’s birthday. If an event is a birthday it is automatically an all day event and appears in pink instead of blue.
This does lead to a couple of problems. Firstly there is no way to add a birthday event from the calender and secondly there is no way to add a birthday event for someone that is not in your contacts list.
I can live without the first problem it’s just a case of adding the one-to-one relationship from the correct side but the “not being able to add birthdays to people not in the address book” is a bit of a pain. I didn’t want to clutter up my contacts list with a whole load of casual acquaintances but I’d like to remember their birthdays. I suppose the idea is that all your contact information for a person goes into the same place. They may not have a mobile but they must live somewhere?
Well not sure if my second grumble is a worthy point, it’s just that when creating an event you can set the event type to N900 (Synchronised) or Private and it wouldn’t take much to add birthday into that spot too.