beewang

Thanks to my homeboy Hormazd recommendation, I made an appointment at his dealer with his service advisor to have my early production 2005 545 SMG (aka "Silver") fix on the BlueTooth interface.

There were some early stage confusion as to perhaps I will need to pay the cost to have the BlueTooth activated. I was adament about not paying as I have a 2005 model car and pointed out that BMW official press release states that all 2005 model E60 will have the BlueTooth interface standard.

She was able to varified the info and confirm that BMW will indeed pick up the tab. I guess there were some issues with rich old folks w/ perfectly working BlueTooth interface who are too lazy to RTFM or too stupid to understand TFM. I told her I was neither and There is something wrong w/ my software. After she checked w/ the mechanic she agreed that is something indeed wrong w/ my BlueTooth setup and that they will take care of it, but I was also forewarned that the process takes time and the system is prone to ?crash? and can further delay the process. I told her to take their time as I have other cars to drive.

Sure enough, the system did crash a couple times and they finally got it going after 2 days. I picked up the car and called homeboy Hormazd for assistance in pairing my phone because I was too excited to RTFM.

The system works G-R-E-A-T!! in fact most people I talked to doesn?t even know I was in a car using speaker phone.

I am sooooo impressed w/ this BlueTooth thing that I think I will buy the kit to retrofit my M5.

Bottomline, Great stuff, no charge, and I can?t stop making phone calls in my car.

Cheers,

beewang

jzbmw

beewang,

I thought you did the softward upgrade a while ago when you got you car. Anyway, glad that you had it working. When I got my car from ED, the software was already upgraded, but it took the sales person forever to figure out how to turn it on.

Cheers.

speedracerF4i

I am glad that I didn't have to go back to get BT. The VPC folks installed it before taking delivery.

Like Bee said, the BT works great. It sucked up the phone list in my T610 phone like there is no tomorrow, thus allowing me to make calls simply by saying their names. Very Star-Trekkie, and I can't stop calling people from my car now.

If you have to pay to get the BT, do it. If you have to find a carrier or a phone that is pairable with your E60, do it.

It is the best feature amongth many great features in our car.

jamespratt

You guys must have some secret spell. Mine works perfectly, and always has, but the quality is just awful. Seriously considering ditching the BT system. Personally would not advise anyone to get BT until the system improves.

jzbmw

I wasn't able to transfer my phone book over to my car. How do you guys do that? I have a T68i, BT works fine, but no address book. Also, could we manually input address book for the phone in the I-drive?

speedracerF4i

I didn't have to do anything but to initialize the BT on the car. It will tell you to turn on your phone's BT and after entering the password, both devices connected.

Then, I pushed the phone button on the steering wheel. The system took about 20 seconds to initialize, and voila...my list got transfered.

speedracerF4i

I forgot to mention. Different phones have different sound qualities. Bee's and my phone are both Ericsson T610. Oldie but goodie.

mikereyno

I have had no promlem with the BT once I understood the process to pair and realized that it can take a while for the phone book to transfer over if you have a number of entries. I have the Sony Ericcsen T637 and it works great. Because I had 150+ entries in my phonebook, it took over half an hour to fully sync and show up in the car's phone book. Have also been able to add in easily the numbers I want as "voice recognizable" in the car's voice phonebook (note: this is different than the phonebook synced from my cell phone). Calls coming in and going out have been fine. What I hear is clear and from what the people I'm calling say, I sound fine to them.

Mike

dfndr

Congrats. Time spent on this board can pay off.

Hormazd

You guys had BT in the UK while we were bitching here in the US about it. I think part of the solution BMW implemented to make it co-exist with Assist was a newer TCU post 3/04 production. I think the sound quality has been greatly improved with this new unit. I have asked close associates and employees to always comment on sound quality at the end of a call. Just today I turned down the volume under these circumstances to remove echo for the other party. Not all cell phone calls are the same so I must have turned it up on a previous (not so strong call). I hope that as the techology matures they will implement self adjusting noise and feedback cancelling mics that will improve the audio quality even more.