Well I guess mystery solved?

 

have an 06 530i and it takes a minute or three for the iPhone icon to appear on iDrive.....also after starting the car I may adjust the volume and nothing happens....a few seconds later the volume will rise on its own from my earlier move.

 

Guess that this is a standard feature... Thanks for all that replied. Just thought I would ask since I am still climbing that learning curve.

Thanks again,
John

 

Agreed on the 5ers it is W.A.D. (Working As Designed)

If you stop and restart and your car has not gone to "sleep" (i.e. < about 16 minutes), it should boot and initialize everything more quickly.

 

Think about the iDrive as a personal computer.
iDrive needs to wake up from sleep.
Has to startup services (i.e. bluetooth service, sync contacts on the phone, start GPS, start Entertainment, Ventilation system, etc). Plus, just like a regular computer, it has to communicate to an internal "network" (think wifi, which need to get an IP address).
All these takes time. Just like a Windows system, it takes a lot of time to wake up even from sleep. Now, if it was done like a Mac OS X, it will be a different story (i.e. Apple computers, iPhone).

I think the startup time is very reasonable considering that this is a first-gen iDrive and was probably developed in the early 2000.

 

Guess that might be my problem. Too used to my MacBook booting up.

I knew it took a while for the sensors to report back, etc, but this "delay" could be avoided with a little smart programming. Unlike a personal computer booting either from a cold state or a sleep state, I would expect that it would boot quickly because it is solid state, not hard drive based. A windows computer can boot in just a very few seconds with SSD drives now.

I am writing it off as sensor feedback delay but this is my first experience with a BMW with iDrive, so I wanted to see if my expectations were correct or this boot time was normal. I think that the verdict is that it is normal.

 

Can I get a copy of the 2010 DVD? :-)

 

The i-drive isn't Windows based. It uses the VXWorks real time OS which should have a much faster boot up time than mac osx. It's the hardware that slows it down.