I recently bought a MyTouch 4G Slide to use as my primary phone. Since I’m a T-Mobile customer, I wanted to lock in a new plan and phone before AT&T can do something to screw it up. And since I’m a physical keyboard enthusiast (I hate losing half the screen to the virtual keyboard–a big issue for a guy who writes most of his blog posts on a handheld device) I got the MyTouch 4G Slide.
One issue that arose almost immediately is that the MT4G doesn’t sync with Outlook. It does sync rather easily with any Google account (naturally) but if you’re a traditionalist like me that actually uses Microsoft Outlook for email and contacts (via POP3 no less!), the lack of Outlook sync is a major problem.
After an hour or two of work, I think I’ve found a good (and free) solution, which I’m sharing with you now.
The key actually came from the folks at the T-Mobile store, who suggested exporting my contacts to a new Gmail account, then synching that account with my phone.
This was only half the solution, however, since this wouldn’t keep my Outlook in sync; new contacts would only appear if I manually synchronized Outlook with Gmail. This did narrow down the problem considerably.
A quick Google search on “sync Outlook 2010 with Gmail” and I discovered GO Contact Sync, a free piece of open source software that 1) Syncs your Outlook with a Gmail account, and 2) Can re-sync on a regular basis.
Once I verified that GO Contact Sync had been well-received by both Lifehacker and PC World, I downloaded and installed it. I set it up to sync “Outlook to Google only” since I don’t intend to use the Gmail account for anything but synchronization, and set it to automatically “Run program at startup.” I don’t need instant synchronization, so no need to run it any more often.
Since I have 2,786 contacts, it took a few minutes, but GO Contact Synch worked like a charm. From there, it was easy to add another Gmail account to my phone.
Voila! The MyTouch 4G Slide has all my Outlook contacts, and they’ll be synchronized every time I restart my laptop.
Editor’s note: It takes major editorial self-restraint to publish a post promoting (?) Outlook. But we don’t censor posts, Chris is a good guy and we can’t help if he is a glutton for punishment. 🙂
(Cross-posted @ Adventures in Capitalism)
Like you I am a T-Mobile loyalist. We locked in the very best plan for our needs too and got the phones we like before ATT can do damage to T-Mobile subscribers. Like you I got the MyTouch 4G. Not the slide because I enjoyed swyping than typing. I am pretty much disappointed too that I can’t synced my device to OUTLOOK. I was a Blackberry user for years so I’m so used with their safe and easy synchronization. I felt like crazy finding fix for this as well. Until I finally gave up, and just imported my outlook calendar and contacts to my google/gmail account. It’s working fine, but the recurrent events from my outlook were not registered as recurrences on my google calendar. So I have to do a major revision of editting and deleting entries. I will definitely try the GO CONTACT SYNC, and see how it works for me. Thanks for this article. Now I found light 🙂