Contacts not syncing between Android and Outlook.com

I recently had to get a new phone because my trusty old Nokia WP stopped charging altogether. I broke the USB port on the phone.

They really should be having a backup port on the phones. It takes a whopping amount to repair once they are out of warranty.

Anyways, I got this new Android phone and added my Hotmail account. The contacts synced perfectly the first time. But then I had to factory reset it once and when I added the account I could not see any contact syncing. Not matter how many times I reconfigured my account on the phone. The contacts just did not sync. I stumbled on this post which talks about making changes to my windows live account.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/oemail-oapps/outlookcom-not-syncing-all-my-contacts-to-my/5a30f3dc-1bfb-475a-a67c-b282d1cd9c89

But sadly I did not have the time for someone to make changes to my account. So, I made a backup of my account contacts by logging to the account from a computer. Then deleted all the contacts from my windows live account. Waited a couple of minutes, signed out.

and signed back in. Not really sure if that was required, though. Imported all the contacts from file after cleaning up the duplicates using MSExcel's "Remove duplicates button" and without reconfiguring my account on the phone all the contacts started syncing.