The trials and tribulations of a new phone and a happy ending

My experience going from an iPhone to an Android phone

In November, I was the proud owner of an iPhone 3 and it was time to upgrade.  After a lot of discussions, I decided to purchase a Samsung Galaxy S3. I made the decision based on the flexibility of the phone and the great screen.  I incorrectly assumed that I would have little or no learning curve in making the switch.

Surprise Number 1 – with the iPhone, if I downloaded an email onto the phone before I deleted it from the email server, it stayed on the phone.  With the Galaxy, as soon as the message was off the server – like magic, it disappeared from my phone email.  Solution – I changed my Outlook setting, to leave the message on the server.

Surprise Number 2 – I use Outlook as my database to manage appointments and to keep track of my contacts.  In my case – I keep electronic notes on my clients, so the ability for Outlook to sync with my phone is critical.  With my iPhone, I used iTunes to sync my contacts and calendar information.  Samsung has a program as well – Kies.  However, Kies did not carry over any calendar items tied to a client.  In addition, instead of integrating new notes in a contact, it just duplicated the contact.  It took me hours to clean up my Outlook database!

Someone suggested, that I use my Gmail account and sync Outlook to Gmail and Gmail to my phone.  It worked for my calendar, but not for my contacts.

After a lot of online research, I decided to try CompanionLink (on my computer) and DejaOffice (on my phone – the app is in the App Store).  DejaOffice was a free app.  CompanionLink cost me $50 for a one time licence (less expensive than using Microsoft Exchange, which has a monthly fee).  It syncs with my Outlook, but also works if you use any of the other CRM programs (including Google, Act, etc.) and works for Androids, iPhones and Blackberrys. For those of you who are Mac users – there are also Mac options. So now everything syncs effortlessly.  (The other solution would have been to use Microsoft Exchange and my email would have been synced as well.  However, I did not want my contacts personal information stored in the Cloud.)

I am now the very happy owner of a Samsung Galaxy S3 :)