Outlook Mobile (iPad) and Save Contacts being turned back on again (second device) This will happen to attempt to ensure no duplicates across multiple devices. If you later on try to enabled Save Contacts on a second Outlook Mobile device you will get told that sync is already happening on a different device and that to sync from the current device will require contact deletion and sync to start. I found this was instant though (but I only have a few intentional contacts and duplicates). This will remove the duplicates but it might take 24 hours for Microsoft to reconcile this duplicate state for you. You need to turn off Save Contacts on all but one device. If you have multiple iOS devices and you are signed into each of them with the same Outlook Mobile account AND you enable Save Contacts on more than one device, then you will get duplicates.
So I was willing to delete everything on the phone as Exchange would put it back.
Here are some things I did to resolve these duplicates. So I have eight contacts and some of those where duplicates, some were missing on the device (only in iCloud) and some where different in Outlook Mobile from Contacts etc. I looked on my test iPhone to see if I could see any duplicates and to try and resolve – and given the conversations I was not suprised to find there were already a number of duplicates. Of the back of a few conversations recently on having duplicate contacts in the iOS platform because of syncing via multiple different routes or devices I decided to try to reproduce the issues and see what I could work out.