In my quest to slowly remove Billy from my life (as much as possible in this MS Windows dominated world), I have grown tired of moving my giant email archives every time I have to reinstall windows to make it happy again. I had moved over my main acct to Gmail last year but my Windows Mobile phone syncs up with Outlook (only).  So I set out to find a way to replace this function with google (the next world dominator).

There are serveral programs that will sync your WM calendar with your google one from your device (google has something that can connect from your computers outlook and sync), but only one that claims to sync your contacts as well. That is OggSync 4.07.  Here’s how it went….

The calendar syncs are a tad slow even on my EV connection and for some reason it had to put my mom’s birthday on a totally seperate google calendar (shrug).  Other than that oddity it seem fine.  However the contact syncing was much worse.  The fastest way to sum it up is from my emails to support [notes added]:

ME:

Syncing my contacts A) took way too long [MUCH longer than the calendar sync we’re talking over an hour] B) made duplicates of many of my contacts on my device… not cool. C) I had to go and resetup my speed dial list

It defeats the purpose of a direct sync from my device to gmail if I have to then use a sync to outlook to clean up the mess OggSync made.

SUPPORT:

Sorry you are unhappy.  You can undo the sync by unchecking the “enable sync” and syncing again.  It will put the device back into the state it was before you started.

It is best if you start with a clean device to begin with. [this was not mentioned anywhere on the site, in the setup process, etc]

ME:

Ok, since I could “undo” the changes I figured I would give it another try.  I deleted some of the duplicate contacts on the google side and then tried syncing again.

This attempt was worse than the first.  It still believed that every contact didn’t match and therefore “updated/changed” every single contact even though were only 2-3 new contacts. It created even more duplicates & removed all my speed dial associations from my Sprint Touch.

Thus over this useless software, I tried your “unchecking” method.  After FOUR HOURS of “deleting contact xxx” (which i assumed was removing all the duplicates) it finally finished.  So I went to my contacts to see how the process worked.  My contacts list was EMPTY!  Trying to remain calm, I rebooted my phone hoping that would help: it did. My contacts were mostly back but in an EVEN WORSE state than before.

“Undoing” the sync created even more duplicates — we’re up to 4 copies of many contacts now and for some reason 8 of others and while others only 1.  Not only that anything that had been on my speed dial list was completely deleted.  That’s right the people I call the most, now I can’t call at all.

And to go one step further the FONT on my phone screen changed with the “undo” process so it doesn’t all fit on the screen!  I am now going to have to hard reset and re-install everything on my phone just to get it working properly again.

A refund was given.