Bluetooth Streaming/2010 Toyota

Typically the none support of certain features is more to make it a general use profile and not specific to technology found in certain vehicles and not others...


To try to get them to update it for that feature or use in that make car... send feedback...

http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html

The iPhone 3GS' Bluetooth profile does not support forward and back, only pause and play via stereo Bluetooth. I had this issue as well, and had to dig around the apple site to find out the supported profiles. My car stereo has the capability to transfer the phonebook contacts to the stereo so you can see a name rather than a phone number; however since the iphone's profile does not support file transfer or sharing I cannot use this feature on my stereo. I hope Apple updates this soon as well as the forward/rewind Bluetooth functionality so I can keep my phone secured in my purse without having to take it out to change the song or see who is calling me while driving.

I don't have an issue with the audio quality from my iPhone 3GS's Bluetooth connection in my new 2010 Prius. But the functionality of the connection is really sub-standard, and either Apple or Toyota or both ought to address it:

(1) Per comments above, when the audio player is streaming to the stereo, the only onscreen "options" are play and pause. You can't advance to the next track or see the track name or artist, let alone browse playlists etc. This means that you have to have the iPhone out of your pocket and mounted in a safely visible spot in the car in order to doing anything but play or pause. This pretty much defeats the entire point of Bluetooth. ( * NOTE: The Toyota navigation system manual clearly shows that other phones/players do offer this capability. *)

(2) When importing contacts from my iPhone via Bluetooth into the 2010 Prius's memory, I can't select contact groups. The import function just picks the first 1,000 contacts it finds (I have about 4,500 on my phone). I created a smaller contact list with about 900 of my most important contacts, but unless I delete ALL other contacts from the iPhone (and then re-add them later), there is no way to get this subset of my larger contact group into the car's system. It also means that if I make changes to my contact list I have to go through the whole process all over again, or make manual changes. As with (1), this kind of defeats the whole beauty and purpose of Bluetooth.

ShadyMac wrote:
Typically the none support of certain features is more to make it a general use profile and not specific to technology found in certain vehicles and not others...

It has nothing to do with specific car manufacturer. AVRCP has several versions of its specification, and it seems iPhone implements one of the older ones (probably 1.0) that has only very basic functionality. Newer revisions of AVRCP support additional features, such as metadata about song currently playing, browsing capabilities, etc. All of those features are part of AVRCP specification, they are not special extensions for specific car makes. AVRCP 1.3 or 1.4 are general use profiles.

To correct one other poster, file sharing (FTP - File Transfer Profile) is not needed for phone book sharing. Device needs to support PBAP (Phone Book Access Profile).

For nice summary of Bluetooth profiles, there's this nice wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth_profiles

Unfortunately, tech specs on iPhone page don't show exactly what profiles and to what degree are supported, but I'd guess it to be limited to HFP (possibly not all features -- dialing last number didn't work on my HFP headset?), HSF, A2DP, and an older revision of AVRCP (again, missing some features).