Duplicates using ActiveSync and PC Suite from Sony Ericsson

Today I connected my z770 cell phone to my Windows Vista PC with the non-included USB cable.
In the manual it says it should be included but to the manual there is also a single-sheet addendum correcting the “typo” in the manual: “using the included USB cable” should read “using a USB cable” etc. 🙂

Anyway, I have been syncing with ActiveSync which does an ok (not great) job at syncing email, contacts and calendar. But ActiveSync in Sony Ericsson world is only for syncing OTA (Over the Air). To Sync with your PC you need to use Sony Ericsson’s synchronization software – PC Suite.

First of all you have to download it because there is no CD included. I don’t mind that because I always want to download the latest version anyway, but I found it a bit strange that no CD was there. But then again there was no USB cable either.

I have owned Sony Ericsson phones before and I was a bit skeptical to installing their software because it has made my computers behave strange in the past. But besides that the installation program seemed to be in a 30 minutes long endless loop installing drivers before I shut it down, it seems to be working fine.

When starting to sync I got questions asking me (I guess I should be happy it at least asks) to confirm whether entries are the same. There was no way to cancel so instead of clicking Yes or No, I hit Escape which closed the window and I thought would be the same as “skip” but when I finally succeed in hitting Cancel on the background window it turns out lots of duplicate entries have been created in my Contacts and Calendar in Outlook. It also seems that for each Contact where I have entered a birthday a duplicate birthday entry is created in my calendar. 🙁

Contacts
On Contacts Active Sync have synced not the Email address field but the Display as field, e.g. Email contains “[email protected]” and the Display as “Bill Gates ([email protected])”.
This I have already noticed because when you try to send an email to a contact with multiple email addresses from your phone it gets very difficult to select email address because the screen only shows the first x characters. But PC suite sync on the email address field and therefore gives you the question for each entry if it is the same or not.
I guess a solution for contacts could be to change Outlook settings to only show email address in the Display as field and then change it in your existing contacts, but I have not tried this.

Calendar
Just as on Contacts there seem to be a difference between ActiveSync and PC Suite when syncing Calendar. The fields Notes and Classification (internal field?) are handled differently.

Email
PC Sync don’t sync email at all for some reason so there is no problem here.

I called the Sony Ericsson help line and the person I spoke with seemed surprised I even tried to sync with both ActiveSync and PC Suite, “I advice you not to do that”.
So basically there seems to be no plans to fix this and the workaround is to sync your stuff either with Active Sync or PC Suite.

Since you can check what things to sync where you can for example select to sync only email with Active Sync and the rest with PC Suite.
With ActiveSync you have the options to sync Email, Calendar and/or Contacts.
With PC Suite you have the options to sync Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, Notes and/or Bookmarks.

I miss my Windows Mobile phone…