Know how to sync contacts, calendar appts & notes to Instinct from PC?

Thanks for answering my other post on how to move my contacts from Palm Centro to Instinct. 
 - Not sure why the moderator decided to lock that posting thread.
 - Poor concept on locking a posting thread. This just creates additional new threads with same topic.

It was painful to get all my 150 contacts to instinct. I did that via sprint.com via a .csv file. My contacts also had the notes on them, which I could not export. There is a bug on sprint web page, it is defined as “note” when it uses “notes” instead. However, this “notes” field is limited to very few characters and if space in-between, it just bails out.

There is a big handicap without a productivity application for instinct. I am used to palm desktop. Palm just has one application running on the PC, with no dependencies on any other applications.

With instinct, I have to use outlook or outlook express.  I have vista on my laptop. Vista does not support outlook express and it can only run outlook7. I have spend another $$ for an application just to sync – contacts, calendar & notes. I use gmail and yahoo mail via web.. so there is no point spending another $$ just for sync usage.

So, now has anyone figured out how I can get contact, calendar appointments and notes to the instinct without using outlook express or outlook?

Thanks!
Tiiger   

Greetings.First,I can tell you why the previous thread was locked.Because the topic has been covered many,many times.

Second,what you might be looking for or thinking of is the OWA (Outlook Web Access) threads.It only works with a MS Exchange or Notes servers.That's what is needed to sync calendar functions.(There was an update to the phone last December that was supposed to address this with the built in calendar but being as I don't use Outlook I can't vouch for the validity of that claim.)If your work does not have that ,one option/workaround that might work for you is to install the google calendar plugin for Outlook keep the two synced,and then have it "push" your appts. to your phone using mbCAL. You can get that here(free):

http://instinct-software.com/2008/11/ocdcal/#more-703

You could also switch to Google Calendar exclusively or Thunderbird with the Google calendar/Sunbird plugins(free) with mbCAL and get the same effect.That's what I use and it works fine.I get reminders and updating it is easy using the web interface from the phone.It takes getting used to ,but I don't mind it at all.It's only a one way sync(google calendar overwrites the Instinct) but it will get your appt.s to you.As far as your contacts,Sprint backs them up remotely so restoring them is easy(cough).

You must remember that the Instinct is not a "Smartphone" in the traditional business understanding of the word,but rather a multi-media phone with "Smartphone like" abilities.The search function is your friend and with a little time and effort you should be able to find what you're looking for.And sorry to do this,but I'm going to lock this one as well being as it has been covered before(many,many times). 

Nothing personal.Good luck and see you around the forum.

BB