ArticlesI’ve have been doing some forensic analysis of Samsung’s PC Studio 3 to work out why it sucks so very badly when synching my Outlook 2003 calendar and my Samsung D600.
I put aside the issues of the frequent crashes, the frequent inability to recognise the phone is connected and the duplicate contact problems (which largely seem to have settled down). Instead I focussed on why Outlook claims I have a busy day of meetings while my phone claims my day is free of any plans.
D600 Model of my Calendar
First, let’s understand the phone’s model of my calendar.
The phone has three different types of “events”. The following table lists their corresponding fields.
| Type | Subject1 | Details2 | Start | End | Location | Alarm | Recur: Never | Recur: Daily | Recur: Monthly | Recur: Yearly |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Appointment | • | • | • | • | • | • | • | • | • | |
| Miscellaneous | • | • | • | • | • | • | ||||
| Anniversary | •3 | •4 | •5 | • | • |
Footnotes
1 Subject field is limited to 14 characters.
2 Details field is limited to 100 characters.
3 Field is displayed as ‘Occasion’.
4 Start limited to date, not date and time.
5 Alarm reminder set as absolute time of day, rather than relative to start time.
It can be seen from the table above, that the Daily, Weekly and Monthly recurring Appointments are scheduled to end on a set date. The yearly recurrences (i.e. Anniversaries) are left open to continue forever.
The D600’s universe starts on Jan 1, 2000, and finishes sometime in 2098.
I have learned about this model by playing with the user interfaces to the phone and the PC Studio 3. It is possible that there are other constraints underneath the hood.
Outlook Model of my Calendar
Outlook has a far more sophisticated model of a calendar.
Outlook’s UI pretends to have a number of different objects - Appointments, All-Day Events, Meetings, Recurring Appointment, Recurring Events and Recurring Meetings - but these are all unified into one type, Appointment, in the underlying data model.
Each appointment has access to all of the recurrence options of the D600 Appointments and Anniversaries - e.g. Daily, Weekly, Monthly and Yearly - but they also have access to more powerful options. They can recur every n weeks. They can recur weekly on a “day mask” - e..g every weekday, or every Monday and Wednesday. They can recur on a given day of a given week of each month (e.g. last Friday of the month). They can also recur on a given day of a given week of a given month each year (e.g. third Saturday in June).
Unlike the D600, Outlook allows all recurring frequencies to continue forever, or to stop at a certain end date. (Outlook also supports setting the count of the number of reccurrences, but that is merely a convenient way to set the end-date rather than indicative a more powerful calendar model.)
Another major difference between the naive D600 model and the more sophisticated Outlook model is that Outlook Appointments supports “Exceptions” to recurring Appointments. Exceptions occur when the regularly scheduled Appointment is modified only for a particular date. Outlook allows a set of Exception objects to be associated with an Appointment. Each Exception contains the (original) date of the scheduled meeting, and the new details for the appointment on that day.
Outlook supports Location information on all Appointments.
Ignored Details
Both Outlook and the D600 have a number of other items, which I have elected to ignore because they aren’t causing me direct grief at the moment. Some of the more obvious items are listed below.
| D600 Item | Outlook Item |
|---|---|
| To-do item | Task |
| Phonebook | Contact |
| SMS | |
| Memo | Note |
| Distribution List | |
| Journal | |
| Post |
Mapping Difficulties
A sync program, like PC Studio 3, has its work cut out for it. It needs to “paper over the cracks” caused by the differences between these two models of the calendar, and allow synchronisation of appointments in both directions.
The D600 model is much more naive than the Outlook model, so going from D600 to Outlook is fairly straightforward, but the other direction is tricky.
Here are some of examples of Outlook appointments that the phone cannot natively support:
- Declaring a day to be pay-day - e.g. an all-day event once-per-month or once-per-fortnight.
- Having a single appointment to double-check the safe is locked, every weekday at 5pm.
- Moving a regular team meeting forward a day, once, due to a public holiday.
- Reminding you once per quarter to check your bank statement.
Of course, a majority of Outlook appointments do fit the D600 model; the tricky part is recognising when they do and when they don’t, and deciding the best way to deal with the odd ones out.
PC Studio 3’s Approach
How does PC Studio 3 go about solving this problem? By giving up before it starts!
It never creates Appointment objects or Anniversary objects on the D600! Two of the three types of Calendar objects it supports it doesn’t use! Instead, it moves all Outlook appointments into Miscellaneous.
One impact of this is that the Location information is always discarded, even when it is not necessary.
The other impact is that recurring meetings don’t. They only occur once.
Now, if you are thinking that the PC Studio maps from a single recurring appointment in Outlook to multiple non-recurring Miscellaneous events on the D600, then you are quite on the ball, but completely wrong. It merely books the first meeting, and forgets the rest.
(Im)Practical Results
My phone has a hard-coded limit of a possible 400 events. Of those, I have a total of 315 that are recurring appointments that, according to my phone, happen exclusively in the past. My weekly meetings are all missing; despite the fact that they dominate my daily calendar. The birthdays of my friends and family are all hidden from view, despite the fact that the phone supports birthdays perfectly adequately with the Anniversary objects. None of the appointments records where the event is going to be.
The PC Studio 3’s inability to handle recurring meetings makes it, in my eyes, not of merchantable quality. I have to warn people who are considering purchasing a phone with the plan of synchronising it with their Outlook calendar to avoid the Samsung D600 (and related Samsung phones).
I am currently considering starting a trial of a third-party synch program. I have also been playing with interfaces to Outlook to see if it would be easier to use my old recurring meetings to generate a set of non-recurring ones to make them more digestible to PC Studio 3. Neither of these seems acceptable to me.
Lift your game, Samsung!
Comment by Alastair on May 29, 2006
Wow, that’s pretty broken. All on top of Outlook’s own problems.
I still maintain that the best solution for those who have to use Outlook by corporate mandate is to get the data out of there to an iCalendar (RFC 2445) format before trying to sync it with anything.
It’s annoying really because the underlying data model for Exchange calendar objects is quite rich, and there are many solid APIs to get at the data, besides the broken Outlook one.
Comment by Julio on August 19, 2006
Hi guys,
Using PC Studio with my new Z400V.
Recurring outlook entry DO work, provided you delete and redefine them. So that’s ok for items where you are the owner. For the other items, you need to ask owner to redefine.
What does not work though is if an entry of an occurence is moved (eg if the meeting is rescheduled for once to different timeslot). The latter does not seem to show on the Samsung.
So slightly better than how it looks at first sight.
Cheers
Julio
Comment by Julian on August 19, 2006
Julio,
I was left feeling a little nonplussed at your remarks. I’m not sure what you are claiming. Is it one of these?
(a) That my analysis is wrong, and miscellaneous events on the Samsung phones can recurr.
(b) That my analysis is wrong, and recurring appointments are not mapped to miscellaneous events by PC Studio.
(c) That if you (or better still one of your coworkers) keep deleting and recreating appointments over and over again, once per recurrence, then it doesn’t matter that the recurrence feature doesn’t work?
I think if this analysis shows anything, it is that PC Studio is much, much worse than it looks at first sight. At first sight, it looked like it would synchronize with my Outlook calendar!
Comment by Julio on August 20, 2006
Hey man,
All I can say is that if you redefine once (not everytime) your recurring event (eg my Tuesday staff meeting), then they do show up as recurring items on my Samsung Z400V. There is an circular arrow icon indicating the meeting is a recurring meeting on ly Z400V.
What does not work well is if you move in outlook 1 occurrence of the meeting to a different time slot (eg say my Tuesday morning staff meeting is moved once to the afternoon). This is unfortunately NOT reflected on the mobile
Cheers
Julio
Comment by Julian on August 20, 2006
Thanks very much for clarifying, Julio. That’s very interesting.
That would most likely suggest that option (b) applies from my comment above - my analysis is wrong.
I wonder if that is because the Z400V is different to the D600 I tested it on, because they have improved the PC Studio in the meantime, or because I had something weird with my appointments which meant they weren’t mapped properly.
I am currently not using PC Studio, so I won’t get a chance to try this out any time soon - I forked out some money for Mobile Master, as an alternative. However, it has its own quirks, and I haven’t been using it long enough to recommend that others follow me.
Comment by Mark on August 29, 2006
Hi Julian,
I’ve been searching all over the net in regards to this exact issue, and came across your article.
I recently got a samsung d900, and for all intensive purposes, the software is the same as the d600. My calendar sync with outlook has the exact same issues.
None of my recurring meetings show up at all, and neither do birthdays of contacts and even locations of meetings as they are all of type ‘miscellany’ on the phone.
I was thinking maybe there was a special outlook event type that would map over to the samsung as an “appointment” but havent had any luck !
Please let us know how that mobile master app goes..as right now, im quite displeased with the synchronisation.
Compared to my old Sony Ericsson, this really is half baked.
Comment by Ed on September 1, 2006
Greetings All,
I recently picked up the D807 from Cingular. Seems to be running the same software as all here. I do not have any recurring calendar items so I do not feel your pain in that regards. I am , however, having a major problem with single calendar items though. It seems upon sync it is only importing past appointments and not future ones. I’ve entered some “test” appointments to find the reason why and thus far have not been able to import a single “future” item. I recieve a report claiming x amount of calendar items faild to import but no reason why they failed. I’ve tested with the most basic of appointments and no luck. The truley disturbing part of this is that my past appoinments, regardless of complexity, import just fine. I really wanted to get away from the bulky “smartphone” that I used to have, but calendar and appointment aspect is second only to making phone calls and is considered a deal breaker. I am still under the 30 day return policy for my phone and if a solution does not happen soon I am going to have to return this phone and get a treo 650
Comment by Jan on September 2, 2006
Hello Everybody,
can anyone comment on Samsung phonebook synchronization with Outlook contacts? I am currently choosing a new phone, I like the new D900 from Samsung. In my company we are obliged to have all Outlook contacts in our phones. I was recommended Nokia E50 but I do not like it.
Thanks
Comment by Julian on September 2, 2006
Jan,
Did you read the article above? You might like to look at the one it links to as well.
I think my opinion is made pretty clear:
Comment by Paul Hayman on October 11, 2006
Same problem with my d900.. has anyone tried converting the .ics file from Outlook to a .vcal file then importing it? I’ve not been able to find anything which does this..
I only got the phone yesterday, I have to say, this is a big dissapoinment.
Comment by JohnK on October 21, 2006
I share your disappointment. I also bought the D600 assuming PC Studio would just work (for Outlook sync). And of course it does not. On my old SE T630 Outlook sync was fine, despite the older technology. Despite hours of wasted effort, I cannot get Outlook calendar sync to work on the D600 via PC Studio.
The best third-party app I have found so far is Mobile Master (mobile-master.com). It feels a bit clunky, and seems to gobble a huge amount of CPU time as it syncs - but it does seem to work, and the price is okay. I just don’t want the hassle of using a third party app every time I want to update my calendar…
Comment by esles on November 8, 2006
Same problem with my X820 and my Outlook Office 2003
Even I´ve to make a buckup from my old outlook because the fcking phone destroy my Calendar!
This fhone is as small as limited!
Comment by Philippe on November 21, 2006
Hello,
I have an interesting issue with a Samsung E900 and PC Studio 3.
When I sync my contacts, the software switches last names and first names. And since it’s impossible to sort by last or first on the phone, I better remember the first name of my 520 contacts.
Any ideas?
Thanks
Comment by Julian on February 6, 2007
Phillipe,
I don’t have an E900, but on the D600, you can go:
Hope that helps (better late than never).
Comment by kasper on February 21, 2007
Hey man,
All I can say is that if you redefine once (not everytime) your recurring event (eg my Tuesday staff meeting), then they do show up as recurring items on my Samsung Z400V. There is an circular arrow icon indicating the meeting is a recurring meeting on ly Z400V.
What does not work well is if you move in outlook 1 occurrence of the meeting to a different time slot (eg say my Tuesday morning staff meeting is moved once to the afternoon). This is unfortunately NOT reflected on the mobile
Cheers
Julio
Comment by Richard on April 18, 2007
It seems that the disappointment is general as it covers almost all Samsung models. I have the SGH-D820 and i am experiencing the same prolems of synchronizing with Outlook..It fails after the transfer of only few contact with the msg thet the memory is full. I had changed the phone for another of the same type and still the pb remains the same. I also downloaded the new updated PC Suite from Samsung site with no avail. I do not encourage anyone to buy Samsung. They have nice models but they don’t function properly.
Comment by Tenacity on April 21, 2007
Unfortunately I only got to read your article and users comments AFTER I got my D900 (me feel very stupid now!). So, I have synchronisation problems (I had some sync problems with my Ericsson, but could get around that in a couple of ways) but for the D900 I’ve not been able to come up with a solution: Is there a good 3rd party synchroniser I could use in stead that is bug-free and safe to use? And that ACTUALLY works!?
Comment by Steve on April 27, 2007
Hi Folks - can I deduce from all this that there is currently no known way of sorting the sync. problems with the Samsung? Sorry, but my diary is so full (Outlook but not Samsung!) that I don’t have time to read it all. Just one more question, is these any way to set PC studio 3 so that it only syncs. forward and not backward so that it doesn’t max out the memory? I was able to select how far forward and back I want to sync. on my Nokia but can’t find the facility on my D900
Comment by Jeff Wnek on May 10, 2007
I have a SGH-A707 (Sync) and when I sync with outlook 2007 the times are off an hour. I have double checked everything and I believe I have my time zones and daylight savings set correctly. What am I missing.
Comment by Hank on May 11, 2007
I have the same problem with the SGH-A707 with everything being off an hour. I had it tricked prior to Daylight Savings Time, but now I cant find the right combination to fool it. Trying to update the software version on the phone now.
Comment by Jong on May 21, 2007
I have similar problem with my new D840. The PC Studio 3 wrongly put all my monthly recurring appointments on the same date every months rather than ‘2nd Monday of the month’, and so on. I am very disappointed with a company who claim to be the world leader in mobile phone.
Comment by Laura on June 26, 2007
Hi,
Is there someone who can please help me, please. I can’t get into my PC studio program, an error message “please exit samsung copier and try again” comes up! Anyone…PLEASE
Comment by Simon on June 28, 2007
I have just purchased a D900 and have been playing round with calendar and contact items. Regardless of which setting, it keeps copying all existing items back to the pc or the phone, hence making hundreds of duplicates! The only way it seems to manage it is delete all items from phone, sort out your contacts and calendar on Outlook and do a Force Synch. However, after that, I don’t know how to get it just to do a normal synch and ignore all existing items that match.
Anyone else have the same problem? Any else found another solution??
Comment by Keith Davis on August 5, 2007
I have an SGH-A707. Have the same problem as above with Samsung software adding an hour to every appointment. Recurring appointments seem to show up fine. I have noticed that many non-recurring appointments simply do not show up. I’m not sophisticated enough to figure out why. As far as I can tell, I enter them all the same way, but they are sporadic in whether they show or not.
I also would be interested in knowing if anyone has a sync program that works well with Samsung phones and Outlook.
Comment by bumbelina on August 7, 2007
hi,
i just broke my e900, ( the upsliding section of the phone doesnt wor but the rest does) so i have no way of accessing my numbers, mesages or pics. i am trying to put everything on the pc, but my pc studio cd isnt recognising e900. is there any way anyone could help me plz??
thanksss!
Comment by G. Ball on September 21, 2007
I am currently attempting to remedy an Outlook 2003 calendar syncing problem for my boss’s Samsung SGH-d807. This the second one he has used. The first took a swim, so he tried in iPhone for 20 days. He is back to the Samsung. The only problem is I cannot get the reoccurring calendar events to sync up.
As to the issue of syncing this phone from above, the d807 has a limit of 100 calendar events of a certain type. I don’t have the phone in front of me, but it has a capacity of 300 calendar events, but only 100 appointments, 100 anniversaries, and 100 of a third type I cannot remember.
I encountered the appointment limit problem before when I synced up his phone last year. Once you hit 100 appointments, it won’t sync no more. You have to delete all the events in the phone and sync a smaller date range. The problem with the smaller date range is it misses all the reoccuring events. So I am caught in a vicious circle.
While typing this, I think the only I think the only solution is to delete or archive calendar events on Outlook before syncing the phone, but that is a horrible solution if you want to keep a record of everything.
Perhaps Samsung has a solution for me. I have a call into Tier 2 support.
Comment by Mark on September 27, 2007
It’s been a full year since i last posted here ! I thought i’d let everyone know that recurring appointments and location fields are syncing correctly now between outlook and my d900 using the latest PC STudio 3.1.2 GF2.
The only downside is that when viewed on the phone, the recurring arrow icon displays for EVERY appointment regardless of it really is recurring or not. A minor quible compared to an appointment not appearing at all.
Comment by Michael on October 4, 2007
I just got an A727 and when I sync contacts from Outlook in Studio PC it gets their name and email, but no phone numbers. Anyone know how to fix this? They show up in the PC view, but don’t transfer over.
Comment by Ben Sommer on October 17, 2007
I find that some of my appointments on both just disappear. There are appointments I put in Outlook that are no longer there, and I suspect their disappearance has something to do with synching with my phone using Samsung PCStudio. This is a pretty major problem, since when I look at my calender and see I don’t an appointment today, I don’t know whether that’s because I don’t have one or because it disappeared. This pretty much renders the calender useless. Does anyone have a suggestion of how to deal with this, other than never synching?
Comment by Rich on October 18, 2007
I have PC STudio 3.1.2 GF2 and a U100. The software still doesn’t show repeated appointments after the first one.
Comment by Richard on November 6, 2007
My E600 doesn’t have addresses in. Why not Samsung? outlook does! After being spoilt with my Nokia which synchs perfectly I wonder if its worth having a Samsung! Don’t you care about your users, it seems these problems have been going on for a long time!
Comment by steve on November 19, 2007
I don’t use/have outlook so can’t sync my phone at all, can anyone come up with an alternative/solution?
THanks in advance
Comment by Andy on November 27, 2007
Thanks for the writeup. I have all the same problems with my SGH-D807. I’ll check out the third party software, and if that doesn’t work, I’ll be changing to a different phone (and a different phone vendor) pretty soon.
Comment by Paul on January 4, 2008
I have PC Studio v 3.1 and v3.2. Phone is a new D880
Appointment Sync does not work at all.
Just after pressing “Sync” It tries to open the Outlook data…after only 2 seconds it says “Synchronisation Failed”.
There is nothing in the log (0 entries) and nothing has even begun to sync.
Any ideas?
I tried Mobile Manager trial version but it just reboots my phone multiple times when connected so that can’t be used.
Comment by Burak on January 28, 2008
I have the same problem with Paul.
I bought a new D880 and although it connects to the computer via bluetooth, it doesn’t sync my outlook contacts and calendar.
I just don’t want to use a third party application, there should be a way around this in the PC Studio????
Comment by Gus on February 15, 2008
Samsung A707… I THINK I figured out the mystery of the syncing vs non-syncing recurring appointments…
This worked for me…
Make sure that the first day of the recurring appointment is included in the dates to be sync’d
BR
Gus
PC Studio v3.1.2 G2
Comment by Parker on April 4, 2008
Hi, got new Samsung G600 and cannot sync anything with Outlook. ie contacts or calendar. Used latest versions of PC Studio on 2 different PCs one Vista and one XP. On both just got ‘failed synchronisation’ error message. Not impressed, my wife’s Sony is so simple to sync. Come on Samsung this is not good enough!
Comment by Brian on June 27, 2008
For Samsung phones of the A707, A717, A727, and A737 style architecture, give SyncCell a try at SyncCell.com.
SyncCell did wonders for eliminating the Outlook synchronization problems with Motorola phones, and they are now expanding to other brands.
SyncCell will also sync these Samsung models directly with Lotus Notes, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, Vista Calendar, and Vista Contacts.
SyncCell has a fully functional trial version, and you can even get a SyncCell license for free by clicking here.
Comment by Jac on September 5, 2008
Hi all, the (yearly) recurrence issue can be solved by adding ‘ANNIVERSARY’ as category to the outlook appointment (right bottom). I found out by adding an anniversary to the phone via PC studio 3, followed by a sync with outlook. The category ‘ANNIVERSARY’ was the only thing which looked different. After adding this to all these type of appointments in outlook, the recurrence was also added to the phone after the sync. Cheers, Jac.
Comment by Mark on November 19, 2008
Hi all, I have a D780 and have experienced similar problems. I was also having appointments that appeared on the same day either being moved to the day before or not appearing at all.
To correct this and other problems I have found that by using the Phone Editor in PC Studio and importing from Outlook and then copying the items to the phone seems to get everything correct. The first instance of a recurring appointment is still the only one imported. So the way around this is to use recurring Tasks and set to regenerate. To update, delete the entries from the PC copy in Phone Editor and import a fresh copy to then copy to phone. Bit of a fiddle but if you only do it once a week or month its not to bad.
I also had a Nokia N73 which synchronised perfectly with Outlook so I have found this very annoying. However the main reason I got the D780 was for its dual sim work/personal capability. I will still be looking at another brand when I change my phone unless there is a big turn around in PC Studio.