Bluetooth and the 3-Series

citsk

I got a 2006 BMW 3 series in December. I've a Motorola razor phone and had initial problems with sync-ing. It would only sync 50% of the time. I took the car back to BMW. They had it two days and claimed it was working perfectly.

I've been through every fault finding trick that t mobile and motorola suggest. I've since spent three months using different cell phones in my car - all seem to syn perfectly when I use them with the exception of motorola phones. I've now had 3 new razors - replaced by T mobile and also Motorola. I'm still having the same problems.

Has anyone seen or heard of this problem. BMW implied that there are issues with Motorola phones

daveptllc

I have a 2007 3 series and a Razr from Sprint. The phone pairs-up fine and receives calls without problem but when making calls I can only hear them through the radio about 50% of the time. Usually it then works if I hang up and repeat the call. It is an annoyance that I live with. The dealer said that BMW has only confirmed compatability with Razrs from Verizon and that each cell carrier's Razr is different. Hope that helps.

07bimmer

I jsut recently bought a 328xi with bluetooth. The phone works great with the Razor and the Cingular service. The only problem that I am encountering is trying to voice dial by name. The car will not let me record a name and my voice library did not transfer from my phone to my car. Is anyone else have this problem?

Thanks!

kyfdx

Is your phonebook on a sim card, or on the phone... Only entried recorded directly on the phone will work.. Info from the sim card doesn't transfer..

carnaught

I'm asking about a different phone service as I have to leave Cingular.

Will a Sprint Razr phone be compatible with the 3-series Bluetooth? Can the Razr's phone book be downloaded by the 3-series' Bluetooth?

uuyrwds

I didn't like the Razr as a phone in general. It kept fading in and out and was annoying. I got a different Motorola that wasn't on the compatible list and it worked. I would ask your new carrier if you could try the phone for 30 days just to be sure. I returned my Razr after 24 hours.

donnabgood1

here's a cool article I thought I'd post here, about bluetooth and technogly. enjoy.

Cell phone chats totally out of this world
Mark Morford

Friday, May 11, 2007

So there I was, happily cruising along Interstate 80 coming down from the Sierra and doing about 85 mph just like almost everyone else except a few rusty old Tercels and some creaky motor homes and, of course, the slew of cold-hearted, machinelike CHP officers waiting calmly for me at the speed trap just up ahead. But never mind that now.

My car calmly reported an outside May temperature of a scant 35 degrees, and the surrounding mountains were still licked by a soft glaze of snow, and I believe I was blasting a terribly cool song from the incredible new Kings of Leon CD, just one of a 200-song super road-trip megamix I had compiled a few days prior from the roughly 6,017 songs stored on my MacBook Pro, which I had then effortlessly transferred to a tiny, shiny Cupertino-designed slab of black plastic and silicon roughly the size of a pack of Camel Reds, a device that can easily hold every song I would ever want to listen to, and it was plugged into a tiny socket somewhere in my glove box, and all was good with the world, when just then the steering wheel rang.

Or, to be more specific, my cell phone rang, but the sound came straight through the car's stereo system, which centered the sound right in front of my face, which made it feel like it was coming from the steering wheel because, well, this is apparently how it works, my tiny Motorola SLVR magically communicating with the car via invisible brain-melting Bluetooth waves. Hence, whenever I'm driving and I get a phone call, the entire interior of the car rings sweetly and I press a little button on the steering wheel and speak directly toward the steering wheel, where the little microphone is, and it's both amazing and cool and still more than a little weird.

So then. The steering wheel rang. The Kings fell silent. The iPod waited calmly. I pressed the answer button and heard a long-distance voice say, "Hello," and suddenly the world collapsed and time and space and distance lost almost all meaning as roughly 500 different technological marvels fell into place in the span of roughly 1.2 seconds.

It was my friend J, calling from Costa Rica. She was, at that very moment, lounging on a hammock somewhere in the tropical sunshine, deep in the jungle, curious monkeys nearby and large iguanas crawling over the railing and something resembling warm, tropical bliss in her voice, and we had a simply lovely and yet wonderfully surreal conversation, me up there racing through the frosted pinecone mountains and her swaying blissfully in her balmy lounge nearly 3,000 miles away.

Is this not astounding? Is this not as dazzling as gods on fire? Is this not something over which to pause and into which to peer and say, "Oh my God, would you look, just look at what we have wrought?" As the saying goes, sometimes you just gotta stop and smell the tech evolution.

Perhaps you are not all that impressed. Perhaps I am not making myself clear: My friend was in the jungle, in Costa Rica, speaking into a tiny hunk of cellular plastic the size of a pack of gum. I was in a car speeding through the cold California mountains, nothing around me but pine trees and pavement, speaking into the steering wheel. There were no wires. There were no horses with saddlebags full of scrawled letters. There was no carrier pigeon nor transcontinental transport ship nor weary royal messenger exhausted from the three-week trudge through the desert. There was only this irrefutable sense of effortless, everyday magic.

And therein lies the kicker: It was all so normal, so automatic and obvious and casual, you'd think it was always like this, that what we were experiencing wasn't the result of roughly 50,000 years of intellectual evolution and $8 gazillion dollars' worth of tech innovation combined with stratospheric leaps of human ingenuity and greed and capitalism and our never-ending need to keep ourselves connected no matter what.

Kicker No. 2: As we spoke, as our voices traversed the planet and bounced around the galaxy, somehow our bodies did not immediately dissolve and evaporate into the divine ether, somehow, multifaceted bilateral planes of reality did not collapse inward and blast us back into stardust despite how we're so effortlessly manipulating time and space these days. Amazing, if you think about it.

Here's my question, to which we all already know the answer: Are we sufficiently awed by our own technology? Are we adequately amazed on a day-to-day basis by what we have accomplished and with what sort of easy surreal craziness the world has been compressed and codified and reshuffled? Verily, we are not.

And, of course, you can utter this same sentiment about just about anything: nature, God, deep space, the ocean, Cate Blanchett's astonishing porcelain skin. I know. By and large, humans are not nearly sufficiently awed by the world around them, and if we were, well, we'd never actually have time to live our lives because of all the standing around with our mouths agape in a perpetual state of wow.

Of course, the cool thing is not to be the slightest bit fazed by any of it. This is the mark of the hip and the jaded and the technologically cynical, the young geeks and hot MySpacers and rabid BlackBerry addicts who see this insane wonderful world of communicative magic as so obvious and preemptively lame that they get to mock it even as they use it because, hey, it's just technology. It's, like, supposed to be our servant. This is one option.

Or, perhaps, you take the opposite extreme and see rapid tech advancement as something so dazzling and powerful that you believe -- as many supergeek intellectuals, philosophers and scientists do -- that our species is on the brink of an "event horizon" known as the singularity, that moment when the cognitive power of our technology outpaces our meek little brains and artificial intelligence overtakes human reckoning and we all either take a giant leap forward into glorious bitchin' sci-fi utopia, or the whole world collapses into smoking chaotic gizmo hell. Or, you know, both.

You may, as usual, choose your poison. Me, I prefer to try and reside in those moments like the one described above, where the tech world presents itself as friendly and clear and even a mite beautiful, where all the waste and greed inherent in all those support systems fall away, and you're able, just for a moment, to taste something resembling true wonder.

It's that moment when your known reality snaps its boundaries like an evolutionary bra strap as time and space backflip and somersault and tongue kiss in the clouds, and you get that fleeting tickle to the spiritual id that all might not be lost after all. It can be, well, sort of nice. Powerful, even. Right until, of course, you hang up.

uuyrwds

I can't remember the passkey I chose with my old phone. Does anyone know how to reset the passkey? Is it something I can do and how? Is it something the dealer can do? Thanks.

carnaught

I believe that depending on your cell phone, the car will give you a passcode (1234?) during the pairing process.

uuyrwds

No, I must have changed my passkey . I wish I knew how to reset it. I have been up for two days trying every combination of numbers I know that I might have used.

pdude1

Anyone try to pair one of the new Verizon phones?

I'm looking at the Pearl and wondering if anyone got it working?

My girlfriend was in a 335 and told me she got her Q' working and my friend got his RAZR working. I'm planning on buying a new phone and don't like the Voyager as it's so big as I like small phones.

I also have a Cingular phone (Samsung Blackjack) unlocked running T-mobile. I wonder if it will work. Last time I was at the dealer the damn phone wouldn't turn on its bluetooth! I use this for work so I would like it to work as well.

hopefall

I'm taking delivery of my 328i next week. I skipped the Premium, as I prefer the 'ette seats for durability. I'm wondering if anyone has had any luck with adding an aftermarket bluetooth set-up. The steering wheel controls are already in place.

Thanks!!

jaxs1

If you're getting a new 328, it's prewired for BMW bluetooth. You just have to buy the module, microphone and bracket, get it installed, then take the car to the BMW dealership so the it can be "activated/enabled."

It's still expensive. It will probably be at least $800 total for all parts and shipping and the dealer may or may not activate it for free. It's cheaper than the premium package, but since you were factory ordering, you could have ordered the bluetooth/BMW Assist package for $750. The bluetooth kit below doesn't include BMW Assist.

http://www.bimmernav.com/store/catalog/bmw-3-series-20062008-e90-index-36.html

The car is also prewired for BMW Assist, but then you will need to add a few hundred more in parts and more labor to install.

Or for about $100 you could get this:

http://supertooth.net/HelpService/interactive_voice_demo.html

pdude1

Okay everyone, the black jack will load the address book. Not sure if it's because it's a smartphone? The bluetooth works, but not as cool as with some other phones as no address book. Still need to buy a new phone that works with Verizon! So at least my non-business phone will work in my car.

hal56

Just got my 08 335i convertible--

I use verizon service and it appears I cannot have a smartphone that pairs with the 335 and gets my slingbox (remote cable TV thru internet).

anybody pair a Mot Q9m -a smartphone that does get internet in a 335?

Or, has anybody paired a Blackberry smartphone thru Verizon

TIA

pdude1

Oops. I meant that my Blackjack would not load the address book.

Also I'm thinking about a new smartphone that works. Want the blackberry but it's not on the list. So need to find someone with one so I can see if it works. Otherwise it's back to another razr that I know does work.

silverbullet12

There is a website wireless4bmw.com that lists the compatible phones for BMW. Also, please be aware that the new Razor from AT&T has some software issues. It will pair and work until you shut the car off and then it will pick up and drop the pairing constantly or wont automatically pair at all.

pdude1

Thanks!

Has anyone used a smart phone and gotten their "outlook" addresses to sync up? Or just their phone addresses?

Also, I see on my razr with sw 1.0F.03 I don't get all my contacts. Might be that I have too many and might be over the limit of allowable for the addresss book. I need to check that one out.

zekeman1

I have. I have the Samsung ACE and it's NOT on the list of compatible phones, but I paired it up and dumped all of my Outlook Contacts successfully - works great.
Z

carnaught

Also, please be aware that the new Razor from AT&T has some software issues. It will pair and work until you shut the car off and then it will pick up and drop the pairing constantly or wont automatically pair at all.

Not so at all in my experience.

silverbullet12

I have a Sprint i580 that works in my 530i that's not on the list. It won't download the phonebook, but works great. Keep in mind though, using a non-compatible phone can(not neccasarily will) cause issues with the telephone control unit not covered by warranty.

carnaught

I have a Sprint i580 that works in my 530i that's not on the list. It won't download the phonebook, but works great. Keep in mind though, using a non-compatible phone can(not neccasarily will) cause issues with the telephone control unit not covered by warranty.

I think that the fact that it won't download the phonebook is the reason that it is not on the list.

taxesquire

Does BMW's bluetooth generally work well? Answering calls and call waiting, making calls, etc?

Any complaints?

uuyrwds

I have had three different cell phones since I got my 3. I have found that although they all work, some work better than others and each causes a slight glitch in the system. My Motorpla worked almost flawlessly. I now have a Samsung that works for calls with decent sound quality, but sometimes I fnd that the steering wheel buttons don't work the way they should. For example, I will have to press end call twice to actually end a call. Other than that it offers hands free security while driving, the ultimate goal.

hemanthh

I use my iphone 3g in my 330xi. It generally works well, but there are some pet peeves. I cant seem to listen to voice mail at all.

I can make a call from my phone, or look up the downloaded contacts list on the car and ring somebody. Works great. I have not recevied calls while I was on the phone yet, so Im not sure about call waiting.

The worst thing is that when you hit the phone button on the steering wheel one time, it rings that last person you called from the CAR and not from your phone. So I end up calling the same person by mistake when I did not intend to.

So now, I make the call from my phone and not from the directory in the car.

taxesquire

Thank you - to you and the person who posted right b4 you.

My Acura TL has bluetooth that works well with some minor glitches that seem to depend on the phone.

I think my next car will be a used 330 or 335 with 6MT. Bluetooth is soooo important when you need both hands to drive, you know? So I'd been monitoring this site for awhile and was only seeing comments about synching.

So thank you very much!

nlz335

I just bought my BMW 2009 335i. I'm trying to use my iPhone 3GS, having volume issues. I can hear the caller very well but the caller can't hear me well. Not sure if it is the problem with BMW bluetooth or the iPhone?? Does anyone have the same issue?

taxesquire

Make sure when you speak, you are speaking into the car speaker, not the phone speaker. I believe the car speaker that transmits your voice is located by the sunroof controls. Also make sure your windows are up.

I now have a 2007 335i and have no problems with people hearing me.

taxesquire

You know how you can use the bmw radio to scroll through your list of contacts on your phone and then select the contact to dial? For some reason, if a contact has a name beginning with S-Z, I cannot access it. When I select the "A-Z" option, it only allows me to access A-R. Anyone else have this issue?

nlz335

Ok, I finally got a chance to take my car in to the dealership. They told me that iphone and BMW blue tooth issue is a known problem. It has something to do with the iPhone. The engineers can't find the problem... it sucks to have paid so much for the car but can't enjoy the convenience factors!!