I haven’t seen any mention of this on release notes or anything, but a number of people who were struggling with the partial compatibility with their vehicles now seem to have no problem.

If you have been trying to get your phone working with your car you want to try again, delete the current pairing if you have one, and start again afresh.

This morning, whilst driving to work. A miracle happened.

My full telephone list was available on the car – for the first time since I switched to the iPhone.

The car was at the garage because when the key was inserted, the car intermittently locked everything down. I was presented with an orange steering wheel with a padlock on it. Taking the key in and out a few times eventually allowed me to start the car.

I do not know what specifically this entails, but the radio did loose all its pairings.

So, 2005 330d M Sport with Bus Prof Radio is working, i do have the 2000 dummy entries as suggested by scoopz. Further reading http://blog.scoopz.com/2008/10/11/fix-for-iphone-and-bmw-idrive-address-book-not-synchronising

Fingers crossed it will stay this way. I’ll let you know how it goes after the weekend.

Interestingly, I received a 2008 325d M Sport as a temporary car, it had SatNav+iDrive so I paired my phone.

The address book worked first time.

When picking up my car and enquiring I was told that cars after 2007 should work fine but prior to that there was no guarantee. The iPhone is not on the BMW Bluetooth supported phones list.

I enquired about a Bluetooth upgrade, it was going to cost over £200 and there was no guarantee that it would work. There was also the possibility of other components of the car not working correctly and needing resolving on top of this, which would then potentially increase the costs almost exponentially.

So looks like I’m stuck until I replace my car.

Interesting that 2.2 is out later this week, although given the above, and past reading on the web – I suspect it will not make much difference. Fingers crossed.

Further reading http://blog.scoopz.com/2008/10/11/fix-for-iphone-and-bmw-idrive-address-book-not-synchronising

So, upgraded and moved to my car.

Re-paired the phone with the car, and it still does not work.

So still continuously drops connection to the car, and does not populate the address book.

Disappointed?   Yep

Unfortunately, it appears that in doing this, they broke the Bluetooth software integration with Cars.

The BMW appears to be suffering more than others, but this is not limited to just BMW cars. Some BMW’s do work, but they tend to be just released cars, e.g. March 2008 onwards. But it is not this clear cut.

After many comments to and from Apple/BMW, according to scoopz, it looks like Apple will be releasing another software update in September to resolve this.

Feedback from various people regarding this issue can be found here http://blog.scoopz.com/2008/07/11/iphone-20-update-breaks-bmw-idrive-contactaddress-book-syncing/ if you have this problem, why not add your 2c.

Lets hope this gets fixed sooner than later, maybe they may even address the 3G signal problem at the same time.