Sync contacts (phone/outlook/gmail)

[jj14x]

Background:
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I got an EVO (upgraded from TP2) earlier this month and am struggling with 'contacts'. My contact list resides in outlook and I used to sync TP2 to it. With the EVO, I installed the HTC Sync and sync'd EVO to outlook (contacts and calendar) - perfect.

What I have done so far:
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I thought it was all good - till I realized that voice search capability doesn't work with "phone contacts" - it must be in Gmail contacts. That's when I realized that EVO has two address books - phone and gmail. Fine. I exported from phone address book to microSD, and then deleted out all phone contacts. Then, I imported from the exported file to gmail contacts on the EVO itself. All contacts showed up on gmail - great! (I used google calendar sync to sync outlook calendar to gmail and then, from gmail to EVO).

Problem:
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Since I use outlook a lot, I end up getting new contacts (or updated info for existing contacts) on outlook. Or, when I am out and about, I update(or add) contact info on EVO. How do I sync up outlook and EVO/Gmail?
I could export from outlook, import to gmail and eliminate dups there in gmail, but that is tedious.
I could get a premium google apps acct and that would give me contact sync capability - but I'm hoping to find a 'free' way of doing this.

I find it hard to believe that others haven't figured out a good (free & easy) solution to do this. Any suggestions?

(I searched - google/forums - and found references to some applications that claim to do this - but there are very few users who seem to have used those and even they are reporting bugs. I'm not keen on being a tester for an unknown application...)

Help !