I'm looking to buy a new Android phone, but before I do, I need to know that there's a reliable way of keeping the contacts and calendar data on the phone in sync with the data in Outlook 2010 on my laptop. For the past 8 years I've been using windows mobile phones, where Microsoft's ActiveSync etc worked well. Simply connecting my windows phone to my laptop via USB meant that everything almost always sync'd fine without any issues. I'm looking to get as close to that experience as possible.
I also need to avoid putting any of my data in the cloud (e.g. gmail), because my outlook data contains too much sensitive information. Security breaches may be highly unlikely, but the potential consequences are too dire to imagine. One answer to this sync question (Sync setup question: will Android, Outlook 2010, Gmail, calendar and contacts sync?) has a comment which says that Android phones will always sync with google, so I need to disable that. Is that possible?
I'm aware of Samsung's Kies, but I've never tried it. If anyone can assure me that Kies works well for what I need then I'd be quite happy to restrict myself to buying Samsung.
I've done other research and found a pcmag.com review from Feb 2012 that suggests in general this isn't an easy problem. However, that link (and answers that I've found here) are all over a year old, so what's a good way of achieving all this in June 2013?