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Subject: Pearls of Wisdom (Tips to get a Blackberry working with a BMW) Author: Brian (moderator) : member since January, 2005 : 6511 posts Posted on: 2006-09-29 08:23:31

I have had my Blackberry Pearl for a few days now, and I pretty much have it working with my car. The phone is awesome. It has exceeded all of my expectations, except for one or two minor things. I believe that the scroll wheel will become the new standard for the killer user interface.

But, this is not a phone review site, it is a BMW site. Therefore, I will share some of my tips in getting the Pearl to work seamlessly with my car.

I bought the Pearl to unify all of my disparate contact and personal information tools (Palm, Outlook Express, and RAZR). In my old world, I had most of my reasonably, frequently called phone numbers in my RAZR, but little other info. I had the most current email addresses in Outlook Express. My Palm was the master record of everything, but some of the phone numbers and email addresses were out of date. But, my Palm had a lot more “extra” phone number, address, notepad, and other information.

So, I imported my RAZR contacts into Palm, and then did a mild clean-up job in Palm. Then I used the Blackberry desktop software to transfer all of my Palm data into the Pearl. That transfer worked great. However, when I tried to connect the Pearl to the car, the car kept dropping the connection. It worked great when I turned off the address book transfer option under Bluetooth. (I had hoped to use the Blackberry “Hotlist” feature for address book transfer, but RIM, in their infinite wisdom, decided to delete that feature from the Pearl.) I had successfully paired a Blackberry 8700 with my car in the past, so I was confident that the Pearl should work too. Therefore, I concluded that something was wrong with my address book information.

I had about 380 contacts and many of them had multiple phone numbers. So, I probably had something on the order of 500 phone numbers in the Pearl. Thinking that my address book was too big and causing the car problems, I decided to create a test address book in the Pearl with only 200 dummy phone numbers. That transferred great. Then I created a dummy address book with 300 numbers. That transferred fine too, but some of them got omitted on the ULF. That told me that the ULF is OK if you have a very large address book, so then I decided that it must be a data problem.

I looked at the address book entries, and I had many entries with non-numeric information. I had letters, line breaks, slash characters, and some multiple phone numbers per field. So, I spent a few hours and did a radical phone number clean-up. I broke up the cases where I had multiple phone numbers in a single field, and I got rid of any alpha or non-valid phone number characters. That took a lot of synchronization gyration efforts. But, when I connected it to my car, the address book transferred (though some of my numbers still disappeared, so I am on a quest for more ULF memory now).

The lesson: if your car continuously drops the connection with one of the robust phones, check all of your phone number entries and validate that they only contain numeric characters.

• Pearls of Wisdom (Tips to get a Blackberry working with a BMW) - Brian 2006-09-29 08:23:31 (3500 views)
  • Re: Pearls of Wisdom (Tips to get a Blackberry working with a BMW) - jordanbecker 2007-04-01 04:02:20 (514 views)
    • Re: Pearls of Wisdom (Tips to get a Blackberry working with a BMW) - jordanbecker 2007-04-16 11:23:46 (439 views)
  • So would it be best to pull it out of the box, charge it up, pair it - Magnum 2006-09-29 10:20:45 (640 views)
    • The order probably does not matter as much as just getting clean phone #s (nt) - Brian 2006-09-29 13:04:58 (559 views)
      • Do emails and groups also cause this problem. - //Aleki 2006-11-03 09:55:24 (514 views)
        • Do you have any email addresses in a phone number field? - Brian 2006-11-03 14:14:33 (477 views)
          • How do I export your Pearl contact list to a comma separated file - //Aleki 2006-11-03 16:17:41 (428 views)
            • Exporting contacts to CSV: - Brian 2006-11-03 20:36:25 (464 views)
              • Thanks for the help. ULF does not like groups - //Aleki 2006-11-11 09:16:27 (448 views)
                • Re: Thanks for the help. ULF does not like groups - jordanbecker 2007-03-31 22:40:20 (293 views)
                • Good to know. I was about to setup some groups on my phone. (nt) - Brian 2006-11-11 10:25:31 (463 views)