My boss needed a new phone and went to Mobilezone.

She told them what she needed: to be able to sync the calendar and contact data from Outlook 2003 directly from the computer to the phone.

The guy at Mobilezone told her that she should get the Nokia Lumia 820 and that the phone would be able to do just that.

We found out that there are no application for synchronizing the data directly from the computer to the phone.
The Nokia PC Suite doesn't work for Windows 8 phones.

The only options are through the cloud or by manually exporting and importing the data, which is not an acceptable solution.

My question is, which phone would you recommend that will be able to synchronize directly with the computer, without using a cloud solution?

Thank you for your input!

My Samsung phone came with Kies and a USB cable. I am able to plug the phone in anytime and sync/backup data in either direction. Also supported is Kies Air, which allows me to do the same when connected to the same wireless network. Hope that helps.

Thank you for your answer.

Which Samsung is that?

Ditto for me. I have a cheap-o ish samsung and it never really worked, or I never got it to. Have now upgraded to iPhone, it will sync w my outlook calendar via itunes, I believe... Or the cloud if you choose

Galaxy S II, but I'm sure the S III or the Note and Note II also support this functionality.

Kies supports a wide range of phones, certainly any of their Android offerings. I use it with my galaxy S2 to sync email, calendar, notes and tasks. It's not always worked perfectly, but at the moment, i.e. the current version, it's fine. Takes a few minutes some times, and with previous versions it has occasionally taken absolutely ages.

I have the same nokia and it can sync the email and the calendar, i use it via gmal but there is option for outlook too

though the cloud. but we want to sync directly from the computer to the phone.

Oh sorry, misunderstood your question.

But do you want to receive emails on the phone or no you just need the calendar entries?

no emails. Just calendar and contacts

In the settings options there are thick boxes, so untick emails and you'll only get the calendar entries on it.

AFAIK, you can still sync an iPhone via iTunes if you don't sign in to iCloud.

Just don't ask me how long this will continue to be the case.

I've never sync'ed mine with Outlook. Only on the Mac - but there, it worked very nicely.

An iPhone, via iTunes, will sync directly with Outlook.

My HTC evo Android syncs with my outlook calendar and contacts at work thru "HTC sync" software via USB cable. It worked out of the box without too much fiddling. Another nice feature of HTC sync is that it allows the phone to get to the internet (its called pass thru or reverse tether) via the host computer. I am not sure if these features are still there on the newer HTCs.

Prior to this I used to sync my Outlook calendar with my google calendar on the cloud using a sync utility I downloaded from Google and from there your calendar is available to your android devices through the native calendar app.

But it will go through the Cloud. Which may be not so wise (sensitive business information).

But there is Akruto Sync which offers a sync with your local Outlook through the local WiFi.

So in times when people want more and more to sync or to charge their phones wirelessly...he wants to go back to the cable?

It has nothing to do with cable. It has to do with not using the cloud and synchronizing locally.

and I believe the boss is a she, hard as that may be to believe

Thought I'd take a look, so got it loaded up and everything - but it won't work unless you're running a wifi network, in other words it's completely useless if you just want to sync a standalone PC and a phone.

And what's wrong with using cables anyway? (for whoever it was said that).

I believe that you can workaround the limitation by syncing over the air with outlook.com or hotmail.com.

You can install a connector on the local machine that will sync outlook (local client) to outlook.com or hotmail.com and then sync over the air to the phone.

edit:
guess I missed the point that syncing with a cable is required...Samsung via Kies can do this.