Windows Tools, Help & Guides

For those who just want the summary: if you need to sync Microsoft Outlook on your
PC with your android smartphone, save yourself some money and a lot of grief by
using Android-Sync instead of CompanionLink.

I’ve been syncing Outlook
with various handheld devices for about 20 years. I’m syncing 600 contacts,
4,000 calendar events, and several hundred tasks. I have a lot of notes, but I use
Evernote for those, since Evernote’s capabilities are far superior to Outlook’s,
and it provides automatic syncing among various devices.

I had been using Windows Mobile for my smartphones,
since those phones come with free, reliable syncing software. But last year I
finally switched to an android phone –Motorola’s Droid Razr Maxx.

I’ve found that the android OS is much superior to
Windows Mobile, but there is that lingering problem of how to sync Outlook with
the android. I read many reviews, and CompanionLink (with its companion
DejaOffice) was often mentioned as the best available product, although at a
steep cost ($49.95).

I shelled out the $49.95 for CompanionLink, and
would have been happy to pay that if it had worked well. I’ve now spent four
frustrating months trying to get it to work reliably and accurately, and have
mostly given up because of the variety and persistence of the problems. Here
are some of the problems I’ve had:

·       
-Messages asking
if I want to delete anywhere from hundreds to thousands of calendar items in
Outlook, even though no calendar changes had been made on the android or in
Outlook.

·       
-Very strange,
seemingly random, changes made to contacts, such as one person’s e-mail being replaced
with that of another person.

·       
-Repeated
messages that CompanionLink and DejaOffice are using different Wi-Fi device
names, even though the names had been working fine, and no changes had been made.
(And when this happened, a check of the names on the PC and the android always
showed them to be the same.)

-·       
Strangely, this
message complaining about different Wi-Fi device names would come up frequently
even when I was trying to use a USB connection, with no Wi-Fi involvement.

I like to read a lot of
reviews before buying a new product, and I hadn’t been able to find a solid
recommendation for any syncing software other than CompanionLink. But while recently
searching again for an alternative, I was surprised to come across a product
called Android-Sync, which I assume is new. I was skeptical, since I couldn’t find
any reviews. But since I was desperate, and since they offer a “60-day
no-questions-asked money-back guarantee” for $29.95, I decided to give it
a try. I’ve only been using the product for about a week, but at this point I’m
very glad I spent the money.

Android-Sync is much easier to set up and use
(partly because it has fewer options – e.g., you can’t sync with Wi-Fi), it
syncs faster, and I’ve yet to find any errors in the syncing. I’m using an
optional feature that causes it to sync automatically whenever the android is
connected to the PC with a USB cable. CompanionLink claims to have such a USB capability,
but it often failed to work, even after I changed my USB connection mode, which
Android-Sync does not require.

I’ve found that Android-Sync works well for syncing
with the native android calendar, contacts, and tasks applications. I much
prefer Business Calendar to the native android calendar, and fortunately that
works smoothly, since Business Calendar automatically syncs with the native
calendar. So I’m getting good two-way syncing between Business Calendar and
Outlook using Android-Sync.

I’m happy with the android’s native contacts manager
(and my contact categories in Outlook are syncing nicely with groups on the
android), but I do find that the task manager in DejaOffice is superior to the
native task app that Android-Sync uses. Because of that, I’m continuing to use
CompanionLink, but now only for syncing tasks. With that much smaller job, it
has (to my surprise) been working well for the past week, via Wi-Fi. Of course,
if I had known ahead of time, I would never have paid $50 for a program that’s
only capable of reliably syncing tasks.