Birthdays not showing up for birthdays after 1980

Question

I have came across a little app called 'Dates to iCal', which basically does what Apple seems incapable of - allowing you to set alerts for birthdays.
Problem is, (whether I use either the Apple way or the 'Dates to iCal) if I try and sync my phone, it only copies over the birthdays of people born after 1980! Would this be a problem with my phone (Nokia 7370), or is it an iCal thing?
Note I've tried deleting all events from years prior to 2007, doesn't help, the phone still seems concerned with when they were actually born for some reason.
Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

This is not an issue with iSync at all, or with your Mac OS X configuration: it is a Symbian issue. It does not affect all Nokia handsets - rather, it affects only those from Nokia—and others—which use the Symbian OS.
The root of the issue lies with someone at Symbian who realized that a significant amount of space could be saved when storing agenda entries on devices like mobile handsets if an an alternative to the traditional TTime API was available.
TTime stores values representing dates and times as the number of microseconds since midnight, January 1st, 0 AD on the Gregorian calendar. The alternative TUint16 API imposes a highly restricted date range: only values from January 1, 1980 through December 31, 2100 are stored, where each value is calculated in a similar manner from the start of the range. Great for one-time events within the range, but lousy for birthdays and similar recurring events, many instances of which clearly fall outside of it.
So, along come those responsible for writing Symbian code for mobile handsets and many of them latch onto TUint16, or use library routines or programming samples created by others who did. Now, recurring or non-recurring events, outside of the January 1, 1980 through December 31, 2100 window cannot be handled properly by many [probably most] Symbian OS-based mobile handsets and smartphones. That's why you see this across a range of handsets from several manufacturers, but not all handsets from any one manufacturer are adversely affected. And, it's why you see some birthdays displayed but not others, because those displayed have a root record date for the recurring entries—or, in this case, a birth date—on or after January 1, 1980. Those not displayed have a first occurrence of the birthday prior to January 1, 1980.
Because this issue involves the mobile OS and calendaring applications themselves, there is no workaround available to users hoping to display the disallowed dates. Only a rewrite of the calendar code for an affected mobile handset, or shifting to a non-Symbian OS device, would correct the problem.