I’ve identified one cause of the problem afflicting my Galaxy Note and some other phones running Ice Cream Sandwich. I’ve been progressively synchronising all my various calendars with Google Calendar, which has worked fairly well, with one exception.

Google Calendar can’t reliably handle annual reminders, you know, those unusual events like birthdays and anniversaries. It frequently gets in a twist and reports that they have a repetition pattern it can’t handle. The nasty knock on effect is that this essentially crashes Google Calendar sync on the phone, but only after hanging the device in a high CPU state for a minute or so, which drains the battery rapidly as it repeats over time.

The fix is to go through the calendar on the browser and fix the repetition pattern for each annual event back to “Yearly”. Sync should then run smoothly, and battery life settle down, although you may need a “battery out restart” to get back to normal.

What is depressing is that these bugs have apparently been known about since last year and Google have done nothing to fix them. Oh well…

On a positive note I continue to be blown away by Swiftkey. Its ability to predict what I want to type is uncanny. I’ve typed this on the Note much faster than I could ever do on the iPad, and probably not much slower than I’d manage on a laptop. Highly recommended.