jamespratt

Anyone know if either of these phones works with the BMW bluetooth system?

95% of the phnes listed on the bmw website as being compatible are now totally out of dated and no longer available. Any other suggestions?

James

jksanford

You may want to update your location in your profile. It might help on the bluetooth question.

I'm in the US, and unless you're willing to disable your BMW assist, they bluetooth option is not available yet. There are quite a few threads on this.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news,

James

NickP

As long as the phone properly support the BT handsfree and headset profiles it is a wild guess as to if it will work with a car handsfree kit. The issues BMW has are the same ones Honda and other mfrs are having. In general the phones have no standard conformance tests for handsfree or headset profiles.

My line of work gets me with about 10 BT handsets a year, so once I have my car (and a working BT in my E60) I can for sure post test results I find.

DrT

James,

The quick answer is that any Nokia or Ericsson Bluetooth will pair with your car and the address book saved on your SIM card will appear on the I-drive menu. You should also be able to save voice commands in the cars address book (independently of the phone unit). However, BMW only make certain inserts (3 at last count) for the charger cradle (sits under the are rest). If you don't have one of those specific phones, then you won't be able to charge your phone in the cars kit and you won't have access to cars integral phone aerial (the fin on the roof). This will mean you have a generally weak signal most of the time.

I have a Siemens S55 bluetooth running perfectly on mine.

If you haven't ordered bluetooth yet and you don't need it for any other function (eg head set or PC) then think seriously about the standard car kit (and getting a dual SIM card for your current phone) - I haven't seen a single benefit of bluetooth technology over standard, yet.

Hope this helps

Regards

DrT

Doctor Diesel

Sorry to spoil the party but quite a few do not work at all....mine doesn't! a sonyericsson p900


I do know that the s/e T630 is fine as I'm about to get one for my wife to use with her bt enabled X3.

There is a memo your dealer can get, I've a printout of it at home telling you definite will and won't work phones and whether the sim, phone or both memories are synchronised automatically or manually.


DD

jamespratt

Thanks for all the replies. I have bluetooth, and it does work 50% with a borrowed phone. the problem is that I need to get a new phone and most of the ones that BMW recommend are out of date and no longer available. Vodafone only supply two of the 100% compatible telephones still. The Ericsson T610 and T630. For example the Nokia 6310, 8910(?), and Motorola V600 are no longer available.

I did speak to BMW (UK) today who said that in 3-4 weeks a new list of approved phones will be published and a software patch released to dealers. This patch will enable a wider range of phones to work with Bluetooth.

It's only if anyone has any first hand experince of other phones that are 100 compatible. Any thoughts??

James

NickP

James... Keep up posted on this, as this likely means that the BMW bluetooth system will accept "sloppy" BT implementations for handsfree and headset profiles. This would actually be quite good. My bottom line is anything that can work with a non mfr specific BT headset (e.g. Jabra) should work with the BMW kit if their software is as accomodating. The BT headset mfr's have gone through the same pain on compatibility.

pbarch1

This is an on going problem with BMW, lets face it the CP9000 is a moto i60, and it has been around for 4 years , the one before that the CP8000 was a moto startac, remember those ...... I have a friend that recently bought a used 530 and they can't even get the phone activated because it is too old ( not digital ) BMW really needs to address the phone issue. They are selling 60K cars that the comm system is out of date as soon as it hits the market. The whole bluetooth idea is a great one lets just hope that they (BMW) find the wisdom to expand the range of bluetooh devices that Idrive will co-exist with.

NickP

Also... I will predict that BMW will get out of the BT tray/snap in adapter business quickly as handsets are changing every 6 months now and the form factors WON'T stay the same... My view: Look for a generic tray to hold the phone that also has a 12V socket for the charger...

Malc

Hi James,

I have a Sony Ericsson T610, which works fine with the car. I also have the cradle, which is a neat bit of kit. My only issue is that people on the other end say my voice is faint. I haven't had time to try another phone to see if it's the car or the handset.

On the cradle front, I think BMW now use the same mechanism in all their cars, I suspect it won't be long before 3rd parties start making cradles. Once that happens, as long as the handset adheres to the Bluetooth standards, you should end up with a much wider choice of phone.

One thing you may find is that phone's not recommended by BMW will still work, but will only download the address book from the SIM and not the phone memory. This is because the SIM phonebook is much more standardised.

As an aside, the T610 is a great phone. The T630 is the same phone in a different case, plastic instead of Aluminium. I had been a dedicated Nokia user for 8 years until I swapped to Sony Ericsson about 2 years ago. I wouldn't go back now.

Cheers,

Malc.