If you thought the only surprise Easter egg in Android 4.2 – the latest flavor of Jelly Bean was the secret to uncovering the hidden developer options, think again. This is not the kind of Easter egg we would have hoped for from Google’s latest and greatest iteration of Android, and it’s more of a bug than anything else.
It appears that if one were to try and add an event to a contact (Birthday, anniversary, or any such) using the default People app in stock Android 4.2, you would encounter what I saw in the screenshots above. This strange bug is consistent across devices, appearing in the Google Nexus 7, as well as the Galaxy Nexus, both running Stock Android 4.2, as yo can see above. Trying to add a December event using the calendar app works fine though, and it’s only the People app that is displaying this peculiar issue.
Which means that if you have a contact which happens to have a December birthday or anniversary, it wouldn’t show up in your notifications panel, unless you add a separate event through your Calendar app. And if you have a lot of friends/family who have much to celebrate in the last month of the year, you better hope that Google fixes this bug fast, before November 2012 ends, else you have a tedious manual entry time lined up soon.
The good news is that this anomaly has already been reported to the official bug tracker for Android 4.2 and has been acknowledged by Google. We may see a minor incremental OTA update soon, so stay tuned, and keep watching that notification bar.
P.S – And those of you who are still trying to figure out the Developer Options trick, just tap the Build Number in Settings >> About Phone/Tablet seven times, and voila – Profit!
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