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Needless to say, the service manager called Hyundai and they played clueless too. They ordered me a new radio. I told him it would not work, but whatever and that there was a "patch" for it. They said that they did not know anything about it.
So back into the grinder..... Let's see how I fair...
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It pairs and connects just fine and quite nicely automatically, sensing which of us is in the car correctly and pairing mine if both are in the car. It transfered over both of our contact lists easily. I can even play the music stored on my phone over the Bluetooth connection using the player app the phone came with, and it's just fine, with sound quality similar to what I get with my wired up iPod.
But the incoming call volume, although not with the music, is very, very low, and I have to nearly max out the volume on the radio to be able to hear the person on the other end. It seems, however, as if they can hear me just fine.
This would be less of an annoyance if the car remembered the volume setting, but it reverts to the lower setting whenever I turn the car off. And it is an even greater bother when Lady Bluetooth's voice then comes booming out at me at the new, ear-piercing volume. If I turn up the setting on the menu that appears to be the one for this function, again I get Lady Bluetooth screaming at me.
I have not located any setting that adjusts the incoming call volume independently, and I have gone all up and down the menus. I must admit that the settings menus are so interestingly complicated in their branching structure that I can never be sure I've actually seen them all (and note that for most of my long career I was a senior systems engineer and lead Unix system administrator at a major Federal agency noted for its technological prowess, and I do not normally find complicated menu structures particularly daunting).
I have a second, more minor problem with the way the Bluetooth works with my phone. When I say "Call [contact]," I seem to connect just fine at first but then it almost immediately disconnects without dialing the call. I then repeat the voice command and it works just fine the second time. I believe that this may be a result of the dormant, "sleeping" status of my phone at the time the first command is given, and so I think that the Sonata may not be to blame here, but the same thing does not happen in my older Prius.
And I have a third problem. The voice navigation on my phone, unlike the music, does not play through the radio and, when paired, doesn't play through the phone's speakers, either. Ms. Googlemaps seems to think her voice is playing through the radio speakers, but she's wrong, so to hear her directions I have to unpair my phone.
Is this by design, perhaps to sell more grossly overpriced factory NAV systems or BlueLink subscriptions?
I deleted the bluetooth pair from the settings under BT, Setup, delete pair. I was then able to re-pair my "re-Restored" iPhone 5s to get Bluetooth to work. It was a major pain and lots of drama, but it works. MAC support couldn't help, when they said "firmware needs updating". The other obvious thing is you need to pair your phone, something I haven't done in 2 years (since the last phone), under settings Bluetooth, pair.
Well, Samsung finally released the phone I had been waiting for, the Galaxy Note 3, and the wife and I both upgraded our phones. She got the Droid Mini, (Motorola), and I got the Note 3.
I am pleased to report that we have not had one single dropped bluetooth connection. Not one, on either phone.
I have had a couple of instances where my phone would fail to pair automatically when I started the car, but that issue doesn't happen very often at all.
What's interesting is that my old phone was on the list of "Approved" phones from Hyundai, and neither of our new phones are. Also, the Android app for locking/unlocking & starting the car was able to be installed on our new phones and works fairly well. I'd say when we send a start request to the car it works about 90% of the time. Yay!
I'm going to say that my issues with bluetooth connectivity are all resolved at this point. It's not perfect, but it works well enough that I'm very happy.
Now if they would just fix the dang electronic steering. What were they thinking with that?
Here is the result of my search from some one who found a solution:
"I installed Bluetooth Auto Connect from the Play Store. In the app settings - Events I checked "Auto connect every time Bluetooth has been turned on." This seems to cleared the issue I was having with Bluetooth connecting to my 2013 Hyundai Sonata. App doesn't seem to have any effect on battery."