HOWTO: Syncing Contacts and Calendar info between Nokia smartphone and Outlook

Your contact list and calendar events on your mobile phone have nothing to do with the contacts and calendar items on your Outlook, even though most of them are the same. For instance, you store contact numbers in your phone and email info in Outlook’s contacts. Shouldn’t they both be connected? Shouldn’t the reminders/events you set on your phone, or the meetings you enter in your Outlook calendar be available at your desk and while you’re on the go?

This HowTo will teach you to keep your Contacts, Calendar events and Notes in sync between Outlook and your Nokia smartphone. I have tested this with Outlook 2003 and 2007, and it should work with all Nseries and Eseries phones plus several phones that run S60. If your phone came with a Nokia PC Suite installation CD, it’ll work.

Setting things up for the first time

Install Nokia PC Suite on your computer. Using either Bluetooth or the USB-based cable, connect your phone to your computer, and start up PC Suite. Launch the Nokia PC Sync application. This is roughly how things should look (things may differ slightly depending on your PC Suite version):

When you first start up, this is what you'll see.

Click the Setup icon, bottom center. Select Microsoft Outlook as your email application (this HowTo should also be applicable if you have been condemned to use Lotus Notes at work):

Setup is the icon that looks like a wrench.

Next, choose what you want synchronized, and how far back and forward you want calendar events synced. If you’ve chosen to synchronize bookmarks too, choose your preferred browser. The list below should be enough for most people:

Bookmarks syncs F'fox/IE with Nokia's default browser

A year back and forth should be more than enough.

No Opera/Safari support, unfortunately.

Synchronizing

Once you’re done with the Setup Wizard, click the “Synchronize Now” button:

Next time, you can just double-click the system-tray icon to sync.

It’ll take a while the first time, depending on how many contacts and calendar events you’ve stored in both Outlook and your smartphone:

Be patient the first time...

... it'll take mere seconds for later syncs.

That’s all you need to do. Once the synchronization’s done, a short summary will be displayed on the home screen:

Over 800 contacts and entries.

Conclusion

Take a look at your Outlook calendar and contacts – it’ll be filled with birthday entries and sundry tasks/TODOs, while your phone’s calendar will be filled with your meetings/appointments and your contacts will have their email addresses entered along with their phone numbers.

Calendar Entries...

... and contacts.

Notes

1. You might have to weed out significant amounts of duplicate entries if you stored the same contact under slightly different names in your phone and Outlook

2. Reminders are transferred both ways, so you can create an alarm or a reminder on Outlook and have it ring on your phone (and vice versa).

3. If you’re using Bluetooth, you can also set your phone and Outlook to sync automatically periodically.