I’ve been carrying an Android phone for several years now and just added a Samsung tablet to my arsenal. In order to get the most out of my devices, I want them to synchronize with the data stored on my computer.
When it comes to contacts and a calendar, I keep everything in Outlook. It has previously been frustrating to sync that data with my phone as it required a USB connection and it was pretty rare the phone would be recognized even when connected. The task of synchronizing that should take a few minutes at best, could take hours because it isn’t recognized as connected.
While I haven’t been a big user of iDevices, I do store my music and playlists in iTunes. Again, the problem was transferring them to the phone since it wasn’t recognized as connected.
Now that I have a second device to keep in sync, I wanted a better answer. Part of my criteria for a good answer was something that would handle the synchronization via WiFi as I would never have to worry about the USB connection again.
I found two very good solutions and the process of syncing my data was incredibly smooth. For the Outlook data, I chose a program named Companionlink. No, it is not free and it is not inexpensive for a utility. Yet when I considered the hours I have wasted trying to synchronize in the past, it was worth every penny. There are different prices depending on what you need so I can’t simply give you an exact price. In my case, I synchronize Outlook with DejaCloud (their private cloud service). Then I can sync my devices with the cloud as well. The app for phones and tablets is completely free, it just has limited use if you don’t buy the software for your computer. Getting everything connected and synced only took a few minutes and now I have up-to-date calendar, contacts and tasks on all my devices.
Once my Outlook data was all set, it was time to find a way to synchronize my music wirelessly and I setted on iSyncr. There is a free app, but it is very limited in that you can only sync one playlist at a time. At $3.99, I had no problem paying for the full version so I could sync my many playlists. Software for your computer is free and it will allow the app to communicate with iTunes (also free if you don’t already have it). Setting it up only took about five minutes and then it was time to sync. Synching took much longer only because of the sheer amount of data being transferred. All my music moved onto my devices just fine.
Should changes happen to my Outlook data or music library in the future, I can update my devices in only a few minutes so they have the latest data. This will save me hours of time and I’ll always be up-to-date. If you need to keep your devices synched, you should definitely check out these apps!
Windows syncs with Android/Google accounts perfectly without the need for additional software. You can set up your Google (and other) mail accounts in the Windows 8 mail app and they synchronise right away. This means you can add a contact, send an e-mail or add a calendar appointment on your phone and it will appear in Windows seconds later (in both MS Outlook and the new People/Mail/Calendar apps). Likewise, entries created on your PC appear on your phone/tablet seconds later.
Even if you don’t use the new Windows 8 apps, setting them up gives you instant synchronisation between your Android devices and Outlook.