[Q] Outlook sync with HTC 7 Pro

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Syncing the HTC 7 Pro's contacts (and I suppose in other WP7 phones) with Outlook is a giant step backward from Windows Mobile 6.5 as I had on my HTC HD2. WP 7 phones (at least the HTC 7 Pro, I haven't tried any other WP7 phone) no longer includes full, direct Contacts sync with Outlook (2010 in my case), but only:

-Sync with a Microsoft Exchange server

-Sync with Microsoft 365 (cloud-based).

Those who have neither are stuck with using a Hotmail/Live ID account, install the connector on Outlook, copy contacts to the new folder that is created and then sync this new account. But there are two major problems:

-The new folder will not accept contacts that have no email address (I have 60 of those out of around 2000 contacts). The only solution is to carry a second phone like my HD2, or more realistically assign a dummy email address to these contacts. The problem is compounded by the fact that when you perform bulk transfer of your contacts Outlook does not identify which are email addressless and rejects the whole transfer.

-The "notes" field in the Hotmail account is shorter than that in Outlook 2010: beyond 1024 characters the rest of your note is truncated. This was not the case with Outlook sync in my HD2 which had the same "note" field size as Outlook.

Did I get anything wrong? Please advise. Note that I haven't yet got the 7.5 update to the ROM: I am using 7.1.

As far as I'm aware, those issues are still present in WP7.5.

You might have better luck using a GMail account for your contacts, I'm using one and it didn't have any issues with my email-less contacts, though I agree it's silly there's no direct Outlook-WP7 syncing.