Bluetooth Phone Compatibility

The R56 Mini has similar Bluetooth woes, although many of the incompatibilities are due to firmware issues with the phones themselves. Many phones improve or stop working with a firmware update.

The list isn’t identical to BMW’s, but there’s many similarities. I’ve been maintaining a Google spreadsheet with a list of every confirmed phone compatibility report I can find, mostly from reports NAM.

Clearly I’m not up on all the technology idocincricies (sp?) – I thought the benefit, in part, of Blue Tooth was the fact that it was always compatible? That would royally tick me off if my phone didn’t work with my car!

You’d think so, but it doesn’t always work that way. Some phones only provide limited compatibility with the necessary Bluetooth profiles, others provide a hands-free profile for answering and making calls, but no OBEX profile for reading the phone’s address book, and of course there’s some that are just plain old broken.

Thanks for explaining the tech end…I opted to leave it out of the post so people would not feel too overwhelmed with tech jargon and thought someone could elaborate as well!

Really, it’s more excuse than a real explanation

I guess it all boils down to ‘somebody screwed up’. They’re meant to be compatible. Jonathan’s overview covers it very well- being Bluetooth compatible makes sure that the two devices can connect, but it’s no guarantee that they can communicate.

At least it’s possible for a fix to show up, firmware or software updates are often available- the upgrade from Windows Mobile 5 to Windows Mobile 6 helped a couple phones with the R56′s compatibility for instance.

I should also probably point out that my spread sheet is R56 specific- I believe that earlier IBUS based MINI systems are much more in line with BMWs, although that’s based on how similar the Nav systems seem to be rather than my personal knowledge/experience.

recently i purchase a rolls royce phantom (phantom pearl) and the built in phone is not compatible with the iphone….very discuraging…my question is , since all the elctronics of this vehilce are BMW , which is the correct phone to purchase for it bluetooh compatibilty, the dealer has not been able to resolve