However, I still wanted to sync with my Nokia mobile phone (not a fancy smartphone - a Classic something-or-other), which uses Nokia Ovi Suite to synchronise with Outlook.
Unfortunately, there is no way to sync Nokia Ovi Suite to Hotmail. I therefore was forced to retain Outlook, so that Nokia Ovi could sync to Outlook. This then raised the problem of how to sync between Outlook and Hotmail. Fortunately, Microsoft produces something called the Outlook Hotmail Connector.
Unfortunately, this is designed to initially copy your Hotmail contacts and calendar into Outlook, and then keep them in sync in the future - not the other way round. It performs this by creating a new calendar and a new address book in Outlook - so you end up with two of each. These are quite different. In my case, therefore, both the new ones were initially empty.
There are two possible ways of copying your existing calendar entries and contacts into these new folders. One is to simply drag and drop in Outlook itself. I haven't tried it, but it probably works. The way I used was to delve into the Nokia Ovi Suite sync options, where you can select which of the Outlook address books and calendars you sync with. By selecting the newly-created empty ones that are kept in sync by the Outlook Hotmail Connector, Ovi was then able to sync the contacts and calendar items with the new address book and calendar. I think that's what I did, anyway.
So now I can keep Hotmail and my Nokia in sync, but only by retaining one PC somewhere running Outlook that I occasionally have to anchor the phone to in order to perform the sync.
But then I introduced a further complication - I acquired an iPhone. It's locked to an inconvenient network, so I don't use it with a SIM - in effect, it's an iPod Touch. For convenience, I wanted my contacts and calendar available on this too.
That was particularly easy - I just needed to set up an account on my iPhone to use Exchange ActiveSync for Hotmail.
