FJ Software

1.8.7 had a significant improvement in Screen image refresh speed. Initially I thought the new Bluetooth and WiFi options for screen imaging would be useful, but since they don't allow control from the PC to the Android device, they were not useful for me, and I'm back to the USB cable.

However, a small problem is that the connection is not as stable in 1.8.7 compared to 1.8.6, and it disconnects randomly (sometimes in 2 minutes, sometimes in 20, sometimes never).

The major problem, however, is the Contact sync in Outlook has become very unreliable. Now, about half the time it wants to delete 951 of my contacts from the phone (I have only 965 altogether). I might have made no change at all to my contacts, or perhaps I added one or two. If I go ahead and let it delete, it goes through all the motions as if it were deleting, which takes some time, but in fact nothing is deleted, other than contacts I may have added to the phone since the last sync (my sync is set up to be Outlook->Phone and I manually override for any new entries I may have added on the phone). Of course the problem is that if I added some new entries on the phone, I cannot remember which ones they were since the last sync, since the phone wants to delete 951 entries, including the 3 that I added. The other half of the time the contact sync behaves normally. I have not been able to establish any correlation with any other activity as to when it happens, it seems to be random, and is not depend on what I might have changed on my contacts (or not) either in Outlook or on the phone.

I am using Outlook 2002 SP3 on Windows XP SP3, but I didn't have this problem with 1.8.6, nor do I with iTunes and its built-in Outlook contact sync for my iPhone 5.

I really like the better refresh speed on 1.8.7, but this is a much more important issue for me and I'll have to go back to 1.8.6 if this cannot be reproduced or fixed. Any guidance?

Are you syncing contacts with a Microsoft account (outlook.com, hotmail, live.com, etc)? If you don't, I have no idea what could be going wrong.

If you do, I've seen that anything you do on the server side, even merging the Outlook contact with the Skype contact makes Outlook recognize it as a new contact, and MyPhoneExplorer would want to add a new contact even if you have it, or delete the contact you have on the phone because it doesn't see it in Outlook.

No, I am not syncing my Outlook contacts with anything else (it is strictly local to the computer and synced to my Android with MPE), nor doing anything else with my Outlook contacts. This sometimes happens with Notes as well, but not as frequently as with Contacts, when MPE sync decides that half of my notes (some are 5 years old and haven't been touched at all--not even read--since then) are out of sync.

I also discovered after I downgraded to 1.8.6 that the problem is still happening with MPE sync always wanting to delete all my phone contacts and override them with Outlook contacts, so something has changed "permanently" although it may not be a 1.8.7 issue as I originally thought.

So it works mostly as a one-way Outlook-to-Android sync utility, at least for Contacts, since I pretty much have to accept overwriting all 1000 contact entries in my phone EVERY time. Calendar sync works fine so far. Notes has similar problems as Contacts but much less frequently.

Syncing with my iPhone still works fine, so it's not an issue on the Outlook side. (And no, I have not been using my iPhone or syncing with it during all these issues with MPE, so there is no possible interaction there either.)

TangoSmiles hat geschrieben: ... So it works mostly as a one-way Outlook-to-Android sync utility, at least for Contacts, since I pretty much have to accept overwriting all 1000 contact entries in my phone EVERY time. Calendar sync works fine so far. ...

If this was happening to me (I use XP Pro with Outlook 2010) I would delete the contacts storage on my phone as a first step (AFTER ensuring you had the necessary backup in Outlook of course .. ), check the date/time/timezone on the phone to ensure that that was all corect then sync with Outlook again.

I'm always changing ROMs on my phone so a complete re-install of contacts/calendar is a regular occurance for me but whenever I've had issues such as you mention then I also do a complete re-install and so far it's always worked (for me anyway!). You don't necessarily find out why the problem occurred but then you do save the time you would have spent looking into it.

Oh, and ensure that the time/date/timezone on your PC is correct as well. Never hurst to check all the basics first.

Just an update to an old post in case anyone else searches for this problem and comes across this. I never did solve that problem, and pretty much avoided it by:
- Trying to make all my contact updates on Outlook (so I could always choose to have Outlook overwrite the phone in all cases without worrying about new entries I may have added on the phone, which would be virtually impossible to locate in 1000 supposedly changed entries).
- When I absolutely needed to add a new contact on the phone I'd tag the name with NEW, so I could remember on the next sync to allow that entry to copy to Outlook (or just add it in MPE's Notes app to be manually copied into my Outlook contacts later).

Yes, pretty clumsy but I could live with it.

The reason for this update is just to record that when I upgraded my phone (was a BLU Life One Android 5.0) to a BLU R1 HD Android 6.0), the problem disappeared and my contact sync is working as expected. So my best guess is that it seems to have been a compatibility issue with that particular implementation of Android 5.0 (no one else seems to have reported that problem), and a problem on the Android side rather than on the PC side.