Bluetooth phone pairing for a 2008 X5

[bimmerfan]

Any bluetooth phone should pair for voice. The issue with the phonebook pairing is basically this:

Bluetooth uses a protocol called OBject EXchange or OBEX to transfer data. Verizon in their greed to force people to buy games, ring tones and other junk disables OBEX on the majority of their phones so that their customers cannot connect their bluetooth phone to their computer and transfer data directly to it. That is why you will sometimes find a specific phone that is "approved" from say Sprint but will not work if it is from Verizon. OBEX is the protocol used to pair your phonebook to your car.

Whether the phone is CDMA (Sprint and Verizon) or GSM (Everyone else) doesn't have anything to do with whether or not it can integrate the phonebook.

The Verizon phones that work with the BMW (to include phonebook) are the ones that they cannot disable OBEX on. Those include certain blackberries and the Razor etc.

Any phone that has the full bluetooth protocol stack and does not have OBEX disabled should pair the phonebook to your BMW. On the plus side, because of issues such as this Verizon seems to be moving away from disabling OBEX on their phones. Just type like "verizon+model of phone+obex" into google and you should find out pretty quickly if it'll work.

Also, you cannot put an unlocked iPhone on Verizon or Sprint because it is a GSM phone which will not work on a CDMA (Sprint/Verizon) network.

Hope that helps.

Originally Posted by Monty04

BMW has a list of compatible bluetooth phones for Verizon Wireless and the other service providers. For Verizon, all of the phones are from Motorola, with the exception of two Blackberries, 7130e and 8703e. I really don't have a high opinion about the quaility of the Motorola phones. Has anyone had good luck pairing and integrating with iDrive other phones than these?