Edit outlook.com contacts in android

Updated 2017-01-17: Updated the blogpost to the new outlook.com experience (on the office 365 platform).

Edit outlook.com contacts in android is a real pain. But in this post I will explain to you have to fix this.

Because Google and Microsoft are in some kind of war in what the best way is to edit contacts, you could be having troubling with editing your Outlook.com contacts in Android. Follow these steps to edit your Outlook.com contacts again.

  1. If you have installed the Outlook.com application out of the play store, remove it from your device. It has been replaced by the new Outlook application some time ago.
  2. Setup the new Outlook application and disable contact sync. Contacts do get synced to your device very nice but you can’t edit them. So they are useless to use. We disable the sync so we can sync them another way. If you leave this enabled you will end up with dupplicates on your phone.
  3. On your phone, go to Settings -> Accounts & Sync
  4. Add an Exchange ActiveSync account. Do not use the outlook.com account. some phones will display an outlook.com sync possibility but that is an old obsolete one. If you can’t find an Exchange account, try to use the default email application on your phone. It should have one build in.
    1. Account name: whatever you want
    2. email adres: your outlook.com email adres (could also be hotmail, msn, live etc)
    3. Server adres: eas.outlook.com
    4. username: again your full email-address
    5. password: your outlook.com email-address password
    6. Enable SSL
    7. Leave the rest default
  5. Click next and select only to sync the Contacts.
  6. Finish the setup (wait a while to finish the syncing of your contacts). Now you can edit your contacts and they are synced to your outlook.com account.