With the recent release of Google Android phone on T-Mobile the forums have been flooded with a lot of complaints from people who swear by Outlook (or any PIM application for that matter) and have complained that the phone does not come with any desktop synchronization software. To be honest I find it quite interesting that the same people who use Gmail, and give up on desktop e-mail clients complain that they can not get Outlook synchronized with their Google phone.

It’s almost as perplexing as the fact that people suddenly want a soft keyboard on a device and praise iPhone for having one YET were swearing at iPhone for not having a hardware keyboard. I’m about to loose my marbles in this mixture of decisions. My personal opinions aside I do have to say that I did find it quite annoying that I could not synchronize my Outlook contacts with T-Mobile G1 somehow right out of the box and instead had to enter them manually…that was until I did a little search on the net for some kind of program that would allow me to sync Outlook with Google services. To my surprise an application called CompanionLink popped up in my searches. I read the brief description and thought to myself "this sounds like a solution…but what’s the catch?" Well for starters the program is about 10 MB. Second it’s a paid application which costs somewhere around $30.00 - true not much but still it’s something you have to add on top of the price of the phone itself. And last and the best - it’s a free trial for 30 days. I have to tell you something - this application is a marvel and worth absolutely every penny. Google has the option of importing the contacts from a comma separated file (exported from Outlook) however I’ve noticed that the file would have to be mapped properly in order to transfer every field from Outlook contacts into Google contacts and I was not going to sit in front of my computer trying to figure out the proper mapping of fields. If you fear that you will have to enter every phone number manually into your android, think again. Companion link (the trial version) has a full functionality for 30 days and believe me - it was a painless procedure which, unlike exporting from Outlook and importing into Google contacts, worked amazingly well and moved every field properly, including the addresses. One negative that I found was the way the phone numbers were transferred. I’m a "neat freak" when it comes to my phone book organization so every single phone number that I have on my device is entered the international format like +1 (773) 555-1212 so as you see I have the plus sign, area codes in the parentheses and the dash between the main number. When Companion link did the transfer, It truncated +1 and the parentheses. For a regular John Doe this most likely would not cause a problem since most people enter the number in +17735551212 format. For me though it was just a neat factor but not a major issue. After fixing the minor issues my Android had EVERY single contact ported from Outlook. One thing worth to mention is the fact that the CompanionLink for Android DOES NOT synchronize Outlook to your phone - instead it syncs them to Google account which takes over from there to sync with your phone via OTA transfer.