E90 2005 iDrive system

The_Abyss

The_Abyss

The_Abyss

Soldato
Joined
15 May 2007
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Ipswich / Bodham
Following on from here one of the dealers called back up today to talk further about the price. The short version is that I paid a deposit, and the car will be ready for pick up on Friday. Excellent.

I have a question about the iDrive system fitted to these cars, which seems to be iDrive Professional Navigation (CCC), and how well it integrates with an iPhone, both in terms of as a phone and as an iPod. There seems to be some very mixed information out there, to the extent where I'm a little confused about even which connector to use.

Any help gratefully appreciated :)
 
It completely depends on the age of the car. The latest idrive system works with an ipod perfectly with the addition of a £40 cable, the older systems unfortunately do not.
 
Depends if the car has a usb port or not. I don't think the usb was available that early but i may be wrong. If it doesn't have a usb port then you have to either get a dension gateway 500 or the BMW ipod kit which replaces the multichanger and isnt all that really.
 
I'd found this which seems to work for iPods, but no mention of phone, and the picture of the iDrive doesn't seem to match - mine has a DVD update further down the console.

Then there's this which seems to do the business, but also looks a little pricey.

Confused.com
 
Very odd - they work here. Anyway, the first is a glovebox connection, the latter the snap in USB attachment that goes in the arm rest.

I wanted to get ahead, but I think I'm going to just have to wait and see the car again. I don't trust the dealer - this is the same one that told me the sound from the BMW V6 engine was sublime...
 
They are both chowing Snap-in adapter with USB interface now. For that one your car needs to have 6FL USB/Audio interface installed (which puts a USB and audio jack in the centre console) and from what I gather it works pretty well.
 
I've got the BMW OEM ipod connector in mine (its in the glove box) and it works pretty well. I need the scosche adaptor to get it to charge my iphone but that works well. The only annoying thing is under the artist list it doesn't let you select albums individually and just shows a bloody great list of all the tracks, so I tend to use playlists a lot now.
 
I have the early version of the I drive system which is only the business and I had a nightmare getting my htc hero to work with it until I updated the firmware in the HTC, which is strange because if you enable A2DP on the HTC, it causes issues with pairing. You need to have A2DP to have audio(not voice) I believe.
 
Also from a phone prospective the iDrive has by far the best integration I've had on any car, especially if you have the voice control. The only slightly annoying emission is the mute option, but from a contact list, voice dialling of names and numbers its great.
 
Thanks chaps. There're too many unknowns for me to do anything at the moment, so I'll just have to wait until the end of the week. Excited about the car though :)
 
I had to have a 3.5mm input installed by BMW, cost £250 :eek:

I use the TomTom cradle for my iPhone so it makes sense to have the 3.5mm input from the cradle to the glovebox and the cradle plugged into the cigarette lighter.

The actual OEM part wasn't expensive but they have to re-programme the iDrive which is where the huge cost came from.
 
If you can get the 6FL AUX/USB option retrofitted I would recommend it, I have it in my E60 and navigation is quick and easy with an iPod/iPhone. Although I hear good things about the Dension Gateway 500 dandle mentions as well.

It basically works like this:


Although seems much quicker with an iPod rather than a generic USB harddisk - no 'loading data from audio device' messages etc.

The OEM one that pretends to be a CD changer looks a bit of a fudge to be honest.

The only thing I don't like about the 6FL one is that there is no random/shuffle option that I can see.
 
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I thought you activated random / shuffle the same way as the CD drives by pressing down on the iDrive controller on the song playing and choosing Random All or Random Directory
 
Lucero said:
I thought you activated random / shuffle the same way as the CD drives by pressing down on the iDrive controller on the song playing and choosing Random All or Random Directory
Click to expand...

Heh, well I tried it again earlier this morning and I couldn't get random to work at all. Just tried it now on some playlists and artists and then my whole song selection and it works! Not sure what I was doing wrong before - that Random option was definitely selected. I've only had the car about 10 days (most of those 5 month old son been ill too so not driven much) so maybe I was doing something stupid. ;)

But cheers for making me try again - that's made the 6FL option much more worthwhile to me! Definitely worth having.
 
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