simplicity

Excuse me while I toss on my rant hat.

I purchased a new car, a BMW to be exact, about 7 months ago. I decided if I was going to splurge on a luxury car, I might as well get some of the expensive options that can be installed. So I got the navigation system, the heated seats, etc… In addition to that I got the option that’s becoming a regular in most cars now-a-days that are semi-luxurious: a�bluetooth receiver. At the time I was told that my current phone, the Audiovox 5600 SMT, wasn’t compatible with the car. I found that kind of odd, I mean bluetooth in general is a pretty predominant feature in phones now a days. Why would my phone be non-compatible? �I assume the bluetooth spec. sheet has some very basic/easy to code for features such as “dial”, “send”, “end”. It blows my mind that all phones would go about handling such trivial things in an unsupported manner, or even further how the bluetooth receiver system in the car could very well handle incoming bits in a far inconvenient manner to confuse the phone. I had just purchased the phone with a new contract less then a year before I purchased my car, so it wasn’t in my best financial interest to purchase a new compatible phone, nor did I want one (I really had gotten attached to the little fellah). My father owns the same exact cell-phone and he owns a Lexus that also has a similar bluetooth receiver. He hadn’t run into much trouble pairing the phone and then getting the phone to dial or receive calls, the issue with him, which was the same issue when I finally paired my phone with my car, was that it didn’t retrieve the address book at all. So all the dialing had to either be done on the phone or manually through the car’s navigation system. Now let’s get back to my earlier gripe, how does a phone with bluetooth technology not be compatible enough to make/receive a phone-call or even more so pair? First the pairing must be handled by very few instructions, instructions that I hope would be generic between bluetooth chipsets. But since it seems all phones use a variety of chipsets, the chipset manufacturers must be the ones that redefine the instructions. That’s just plain awful, if I have a bluetooth phone, and I purchase a headset or receiver, there shouldn’t be any reason why compatibility should be brought up with pairing those two items. I, though, was one of the few lucky ones. I have an incompatible phone that semi-works with my cars bluetooth receiver.�

As I stated earlier, my father’s car and my car both seem to be showing similar issues with our phones. We can pair our phones to the car perfectly fine, and dial/receive calls. The issue is that the phone can’t send the address book over, so the actual numbers/names from the contact list never show up. In retrospect this makes sense, phones have their own contact managers and they seem to manage and tag contacts in their own fashion. I’m not sure if the tags follow any sort of standard format, it seems naturally they would, because contacts are managed on various platforms and through many different types of software. But it seems to me that even though there are tools to export contacts into certain formats, that not all systems use a generic tagging system for names, numbers, etc… So the issue now becomes why is this the case, why is it that one of the most basic features of a phone can’t be done with the bluetooth receiver in my car? I find it really annoying and I’m hoping further down the line at some point this will be fixed at the very least or more importantly a general standard for contacts is created and all phones, systems, and pieces of software start using the generic standardized tags. I�assume that the contacts may be in an XML format, so the tagging scheme should start becoming standardized. Obviously each contact manager will have various types of fields, depending on the various audiences the manager is directed�toward, but the general idea is to keep the�name in a standard tag, the�main-number in a standard tag, the home-number, etc… This would then allow for easy pairing with not only bluetooth receiver’s, but for simple syncing and exporting.�

�In my case, I’m not sure if it’s the actual receiver or the SmartPhone, my guess is probably a little of both. But in my research I’ve found that a few people who’ve used a SmartPhone with Windows Mobile 5 and above tend to not have any issues syncing their address books with the BMW bluetooth receiver. Though my phone is said to not support�any new version of Windows Mobile. So I’ll just wait for the iPhone�and hope that it’s able to pair correctly with my receiver and the receiver can actually sync the address book.