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On Google Android, running on my T-Mobile G1, there is a icon which appears in the notification bar whenever the phone is syncing Gmail, Calendar, Contacts, etc. Typically this icon only appears for a second or two and then goes away. However, a week or so ago I began noticing that my G1’s battery was being completely exhausted at least daily, and quite often I’d pick up the phone to find it very hot with the sync icon stuck on. The warmth seemed to be caused by the radio being constantly in use for extended periods of time as sync tried to occur. While I could deal with the sync not always working right or my having to cancel an in-progress sync, having to charge the phone a few times per day was becoming a big problem.
My short-term workaround was to leave the phone on the charger overnight and allow it to sync then, which seemed to work. However, this was obviously not a solution. Yesterday I finally took time to look into the problem. To start, if I entered Settings → Data Synchronization, the Application sync settings portion would often indicate that sync hadn’t occurred for a day or two. When I manually initiated a sync I noticed that while Gmail and Contacts synced and completed reasonably fast (a few seconds each), the Calendar sync seemed to start and stop repeatedly, never finishing during the time I watched it.
Signing into Google Calendar, which I don’t do very often, showed the error above, stating that …this is not a Calendar user: http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/adsense-calendar@google.com/public/basic. This calendar is a Google AdSense calendar found on this page within the AdSense help documentation, entitled How do I subscribe to the AdSense Calendar. After removing the entry for this seemingly broken calendar from my Other calendars list I initiated another sync from the phone (Settings → Data Synchronization → MENU → Sync now) and it all syncing completed within 30 seconds.
If one visits the page from which the aforementioned AdSense calendar is linked, the link is still active, but attempting to add the calendar results in this error. Since I’d added this calendar without error a while ago, I suspect that once it became unavailable the phone was unable to promptly complete a calendar sync, having to wait for something to time out before it could complete. Unfortunately, until this timeout the radio was active, which ate battery and caused the phone to warm up.
In the last day or two, the sync icon on my G1 is staying on as well. However, I don’t have any issues with my google calendar (as far as I can tell). T-mobile customer service recommends a master-reset of my phone, but I’d rather not do that, if I can avoid it.
I have disabled auto-sync of my calendar, and have disabled Gmail, Calendar and Contact sync-ing. But when I re-enabled Auto-sync, the sync icon appears on the top icon bar. Very frustrating.
If anyone has any other ideas, I’ll be grateful to hear them.
Jasper: Have you tried just disabling them one at a time, to see if it’s Calendar or Contact sync specifically which is causing the problem?
I too am having a similar problem. The calendar will sync in perpetuity, and I only have 3 calendars. It drains the battery within hours and the only way to stop it is to disable syncing. I’m running the Cyanogen build, but the calendar app is the same.
Ken: Have you possibly tried removing the calendars one at a time to see which one it is? I really wish I had a solution for you, but this seems like one of the weirdly buggy things left in Android…
Removing calendars does help, but it doesn’t fix the problem entirely. (I can have any one of my personal ones enabled alone, and it still occasionally hangs.) I’m convinced it’s a software loop of some kind.