Mac (OS X 10.6), Anrodid Phone, Google Apps - how to keep Contacts in sync?

I have a client who I've been working with for some time now. She has a Mac Book running Snow Leopard, and Android phone, and we run her personal email through a Google Apps account. She is not tech saavy, annd has little interest in becoming so. Before she bought the Android, she used Outlook for Mac 2011, kept her mail contacts, and calendar all locally on her Mac. No need to sync anything. When she bought the Android, she went down to the T-Mobile store, and they took her contacts and uploaded them to her personal Gmail account (and managed to keep get the Categories converted to Groups -yay!), and then connected that account with her phone. However, they either didn't explain to her sufficiently, or she failed to undersstand that the Contacts that she now had on her Adnroid phone were not connected (syncing) with the contacts that she had on her Mac. Nor the Calendar. When she asked me about getting this stuff all connected, I suggested the option of creating a Google Apps account for her domain email account and running her mail, contacts and calendar through that, assuming that connecting these with the Mac would be straight forward. Not so much.

First off Outlook for Mac 2011 is basically a stand alone product that doesn't really connect to anything on it's own. You can use Sync Service to sync Contacts and Calendar with Mac Address Book and iCal, but if then you need to have those sync with Google Apps in order to get data to the Android. Supposedly this ability to sync with Google Contacts and Google Calendar are built in to Address Book and iCal, however, in reality, only the iCal sync actually works. The Address Book sync, only syncs with Google when iTunes runs a sync with some other iDevice (iPhone, iPad, iPod). My client does not own any of these devices, and thus doesn't sync ever using iTunes. So no Contact sync with Address Book. I convinced her to stop using Outlook for Mac 2011 (which ran very slow for her anyway) and got her using the native Mac apps directly, but still the problem with Contact sync.

She does not like the Google web interface, and doesn't want to use it. She wants to use Apple Mail, or some Outlook analog.

I've now checked into several third part apps to accomplish the contact sync:

* SyncMate - doesn't appear to sync Contact Groups * Contacts sync for Google Gmail - syncs groups but has to be manually run and a password entered every time. This is not acceptable to my client. * Spanning Sync - worked great to get the Calendar up to Google Apps, but they've suspended sales due to Apple breaking the Calendar sync. Can't remember if it synced Google Contact groups. Even if it does, if I can't buy it, it's not an option.

What I find myself back to is using a hosted Microsoft Exchange as the backend, at least for Contacts and Calendar. I know that Address Book and iCal can connect to Exchange, and I'm fairly certain that Android can too. What I don't know if what largely undocumented limitations I may run into: unsupported contact fields, groups/categories, etc.

I've been dealing with these issues for about 6 months, and I'm at my wits end. I'd love any suggestions for working this out. If there's things I missed, I'd love to hear what they are. If she had an iPhone, I'd just move her stuff to iCloud and be done with it. It may come down to that, I don't know.

Any help/advice would be appreciated. Thanks!

PS: x-posting at /r/mac