Android: how do you synchronize Outlook without using Gmail?

[pm]

Ever since someone on the forum mentioned it, I've been seriously thinking about buying a Samsung i7500. It's got pretty much everything that I want - a 3.5mm headphone jack, it takes SD cards, it's running Android which I generally like, it's small, it's thin, it looks pretty nice, it has a decent camera and can take videos, GPS, WiFi and an OLED screen and it runs on T-Mobile USA's 3G network.

I'm in Poland now where they've been advertising it, and then I'll be in Germany in two weeks and Austria soon after. I am pretty sure that I can get one unlocked in one of these three countries and the prices for decent smartphones contract-free don't seem too excessive over here... I'm seriously thinking about it.

But, I have to be able to synchronize Outlook with the phone without using the internet - so no Google Calendar or anything like that. So from the laptop to the phone and back again without going out on the internet. It seems like this would be possible, but I can't find an app that does this. I'm willing to pay (a bit) for one - so it doesn't have to be free, although free is of course, always preferred.

Any suggestions?

 

[UNCjigga]

1. First and foremost, confirm that the European i7500 includes support for North American 3G bands (i.e. T-Mobile uses AWS in the US). There might be a separate US version, so if you buy the Euro one and bring it here you might be stuck on 2.5G EDGE.

2. Who is your mail provider? Are you using POP3/IMAP with Outlook or are you using a corporate mailbox on Microsoft Exchange? Google has a variety of options to sync Gmail with Outlook, and recently announced an integrated solution for syncing mail, contacts and calendar with Outlook but that requires a corporate Google Apps/Gmail account.

 

[pm]

It looks like it's there's only one version of the i7500 and it includes AWS on it. But I'll double check that.

I'm getting my mail through exchange, and there's no way my company is going to let me sync my calendar or contacts through Google. I want to do something like what you could do with the iPhone and just plug it in and check the boxes and sync the two over USB or Bluetooth. There's no way to do that without getting Google involved?

 

[UNCjigga]

Well if you're using corporate mail on the right version of Exchange server, you can wait for either official Exchange Server support in Android (not sure if it has this?) or a 3rd-party app. Either way you may need to get IT involved on provisioning your device for access if the mail server is behind a firewall. But that would actually be the most elegant solution as there is no "syncing" done--anything sent/received through your mail server is automatically available on your device.