Help for Smartphone Newbie

[admin]

First the background: I am reasonable savy on the computer and tablet, yet resisted the siren call of the smartphone until yesterday. Starting school for second career in CAD in a couple months.

Phone: Kyocera Android on Verizon

Until now I have been suspicious and avoided using cloud and online e-mail services. (I use the Outlook 2007 program for calendar, email, and contacts.) Yes, I am old fashioned and don’t fully trust my info floating in the cloud, or opening a web page to write an e-mail.

The best I can figure is that there is no easy, reliable, and FREE method of just syncing all my stuff onto the Smartphone directly..like my old palm devices used to do so well. I uploaded contacts to the Verizon backup svc so that’s done but if I change one (Computer or phone), the other isn’t changed without aggravation.

So here’s the question, assuming that I will have to get over my reluctance to have things synced over the net, what is the best option? Gmail? Outlook.com?

I am not a power user that needs the calendar to show full daily schedules, just appointments, B’days, holidays, etc.

How do you handle e-mails? I write many, and like to keep them. (I am also an author, working on third book, my e-mails are useful to my writing.) I have thousands in outlook, The search function works well, I don’t like the idea of having them in the cloud where they could disappear.

What would you suggest?

Grizz

[admin]

I am no android expert but I would assume that your Gmail contacts should Sync seamlessly with your device.

[admin]

That’s the thing, I don’t keep contacts in Gmail…I’m pretty sure I have an account or two, but I don’t use them. (I own a domain for my personal e-mail and run my business stuff through my ISP e-mail account.)

[admin]

My first smartphone id LG-E400/LG L3 with android. It has two e-mail apps.[ First is general, all e-mail addresses app. You can add yahoo, Gmail and other providers. Second is Gmail, for gmail address only. I used first for short time, however it wasn’t that bad. Gmail app works very good to, and I only use this one now, because 95% of my mails goes through my gmail account.
So you can (probably, I’m not an expert in android, just talking about my experience), easily sync your accounts and contacts. One thing I learnt about using e-mail on different devices and with different apps/programs was: always check your settings. Unfortunately I learnt it hard way, when I deleted some important mails that where both thunderbird and on server, and “delete both copies” was turned on.

Wysyłane z mojego LG-E400 za pomocą Tapatalk 2

[admin]

I use a computer program called gsyncit, it runs in the background on my PC and syncs my Outlook contacts and calendar items with my google contact and calendar items. It is relatively inexpensive and works well.

[admin]

Android is basically a portal for all the services from Google, like Gmail. You can sync you contacts to your Google account and those can be accessed from any device you are logged into. It is a cloud service but that’s sorta the way the trend is going. You could also export your contacts as file, a CSV, to another phone over Bluetooth. As a bonus tip for privacy and security, only use an incognito browser when borrowing a computer and make sure to uncheck the “keep me logged in” box. Hope that helps.

[admin]

Android can be run fairly Google free. It’s simplest to feed the Google machine and you do get some good results for your sharing of info, but there are solutions beyond Google. At a minimum, you have to pick an Android App store that you will give some information to. There are others besides Google, Amazon being the biggest. If you’re running the factory OS on Verizon, you’ll have to do your initial phone setup with a gmail account–at least to my understanding of things. You don’t ever have to use it for email though. If you’re willing to root and ROM, then you can skip the gmail/Gapps setup entirely.

You can run contacts and email in apps other than what Google/Android supply. There’s a secure Android app for use with standard Outlook/Exchange email, but the name escapes me at the moment. You’ll have to pay for a license as I recall.

Rooting will give you security and privacy options to give you fine control over what apps have access to. This can break an app though so some experimentation with apps and their settings is needed. On the other hand, Rooting will usually break the secure email tools which consider a rooted phone insecure. There are apps to hide root from other apps on a by app basis as well to keep things happy generally.

Syncing to your own desktop/server is not particularly popular. Free solutions usually involve some cloud transfer. Because of the new links rules, you’ll have to search for MyPhoneExplorer and Android-sync for some possible solutions. I’ve not tried these but they appear to be on track for what you want.

[admin]

Thanks for all the responses. I bit the bullet and went the G-mail route for my contacts and calendar. I am considering rooting the phone, if just to ditch all the bloatware Verizon decides I need. Having the ability to turn off the data function and only sync things when I want to, does at least give me the feeling that I am in control of my contacts and calendar.

Grizz

[Author]

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