I was recently faced with the question of “How do I add a birthday event to my calendar on my iPhone?” Quickly, I said, “You just tap the plus sign to add a new event and select the “Birthday” calendar, right?” Wrong! You can’t select the birthday calendar on your phone, it just defaults to your main “Personal” calendar. This is very strange and I don’t understand why you aren’t given the option to select the “Birthday” calendar, but the fact is, you can’t. I was completely stumped. My birthdays just show up automatically because of an application I use called AddressBookSync (read more about that), so I’ve never been faced with this dilemma.
After almost completely giving up, it dawned on me that I can also see a contact’s birthday when I’m viewing their information in the contact list. Could it be that you have to add birthday information within the contact list to get it to show up on your calendar? Sure enough, if you view a contact on your phone and edit their information, you can tap the “plus” sign to add a new field at the very bottom. One of the options for this new field is “Birthday”. This allows you to add that person’s birthday. Now switch back over to your calendar and you’ll see that person’s birthday on your calendar.
It’s kind of an odd way to do it in my opinion, but it seems to be the only solution to manually add birthdays on your iPhone.
7 Comments
aileen hankin
i have this problem too. it’s a mad way of doing it especially as most people have birthdays of friends that aren’t on mobile. especially children. it’s driving me mad having just splashed out on an iphone 4
Jack Spratt
Know what sux even worse, and I have yet to see a blog/website/discussion board mention? What happens when I want to remember my nephews’ birthdays, and they don’t have contact info because they’re 6 years old? I have to create more contact records to further clog my contact list up, just so I can add their birthdays?? Stupid, stupid, stupid. This is an epic fail on Apple’s part.
Nicholas-Mark
Mate, on behalf of all iPhone users, thank you so much for writing this piece. I was going to rage quit soon.
Peter Mueller
I am in full agreement! How stupid is it that you have a dedicated birthday calendar where you can’t manually input any birthdays? Is that the user friendliness of apple?
K
Follow the easy steps in the link below guys!!!!
http://www.utilitap.com/weekcalendar/faq.php?item=birthdays
Apple Should have made ‘adding birthday’ more obvious…
But well it works
NTSC
K… Pay attention! We are wondering how to add a birthday without a contact.
Matt
@NTSC unfortunately I don’t believe it’s possible. However, what I did was just create a google calendar called “Birthdays” and synced it with my iPhone. You can then add an event (aka a birthday) just as you would add any other event. Hope that helps!