Thanks for your help.

Diego

Kies Outlook Sync does a good job of copying contacts onto the phone.
– If I add a new contact in Outlook and then sync, it appears on the phone
– If I edit the contact on the phone and then sync, the correction appears in Outlook.

However, there are lots of problems:
– Usually when I try to use Kies to save contacts to the PC, it hangs, and I have to use task manager to terminate it. Even task manager takes ages to stop it: As soon as I tell task manager to close the non responding application Kies, the hard disk light starts flashing, and hard disk activity continues for about 30 seconds before the application closes.
– If I add a contact on the phone and then do a sync in Kies, the new contact does not appear in Outlook.
– I’ve got multiple entries for the same contact in the phone: One version seems to have come from Outlook, another from Skype, another from Gmail, and I don’t know where the fourth came from. The phone has some option to join these contacts, so that only two or three show, but they don’t sync over to Outlook, and it’s not clear what “joining” means
– When I create a contact on the phone, it gives me three choices for where to store the contact: Google, Phone or SIM.
– - Contacts stored in Google will appear on the phone contact list, but not in contacts on Kies, and not in Outlook after a sync
– - Contacts stored in the Phone will appear on the phone contact list and on the Kies contact list, but not in Outlook after a sync
– - Contacts stored on the SIM are not seen in Contacts on the phone (even though that was the application that created them) and are not seen in Kies and do not appear in Outlook after a sync.
– There is no setting the options to control what happens if there is a conflict between Outlook and Samsung. Both Palm and Nokia synchronising software provide these type of settings: For example, Outlook to over ride Phone, Phone to over ride Outlook, latest edit to over ride the other, or in case of conflict create duplicate entries and draw attention to them and so on.
– There is no log of what synchronisation has done, so I can’t see what was added, changed or deleted.
– While using Kies, if I press the home key on the phone to have a look at Contacts on the phone, it disconnects from Kies (fair enough) but there seems to be no way to re-connect except to unplug and replug.
– If I leave Contacts running on the PC when I disconnect the phone, the list of contacts disappears and it tells me they will be loaded when I connect the phone. However, when I connect the phone, it goes through the loading process and tells me there are no contacts.
– The Kies function to back up the phone gives me an option to back up contacts. This runs for about 5 minutes, then reports that backup failed with no explanation.