Iphone OS 3.0 Review on the Prius 2010

I'm very anxious to hear about your test. If you need confirmation on another 2010, please let me know.

I've got the Prius V w/ AT and an iPhone 3G. I'll be switching to OS 3 as soon as it comes out so that I can try music streaming.

If there is a role to be played, and you need help, please let me now. Just send a personal message.

 

Is the contact transfer thing specific for the Gen3 Prius, or can you also do it on a Gen2? I cant for the life of me figure out how to do it.

 

Also have an iPhone 3G and will get my Prius 2 with Bluetooth next week. Very interested to learn the results of your test. Thanks for doing this. I suppose the new iPhone (3G S) will also be compatible with this technology since it's coming loaded with the 3.0 software.

 

My Blackberry Storm worked fine as far as transferring contacts as well as BT audio ... it's a nice option to have!

 

I'm running iPhone 3.0 OS, and just got my 2010 Prius yesterday.

The Contact Transfer is AMAZING. It went almost too fast - over 300 contacts in only several seconds. I actually didn't think it had worked at all. I honestly didn't want ALL my contacts sent over to the car's address book.... but then I found the "dial by name" voice command, which is much better than the Gen II's voice tags - so having that many entries isn't so bad.

The bluetooth audio streaming is pretty good. There are two separate pairing processes - one for phone BT links, one for audio. After pairing the audio streaming, the car links with the iphone and starts playing right away, without having to dig into your pocket. This was surprising the first couple times it happened - "They'd NEVER play THIS on the radio..." I'd think to myself before I realized that it the playlist in my pocket playing. The sound quality is better than I expected - but not CD quality.
I would call the audio streaming excellent, except that there are no transport controls via the Prius's HUD except for pause/resume, and there's no on-screen playlist browsing.

Another thing that I wish they'd implemented - it would have been nice if the Prius's address book imported addresses from the iPhone into it, and allow the user to "go to" an address in the address book. What with apple supporting this in their iPhone Google Maps, I suppose that all the integration NAV systems will have this in a few years. Oh well.


Just my 2 spacebucks...

Dave

 

To those of you who have 3.0 installed on your iPhoneG does the tethering option work? I have a jailbroken 2.2 phone and PDANet enables me to tether my iPhone to my laptop and AT&T does NOT bill for it. As far as they're concerned the connection time is directly through the iPhone. I won't get 3.0 until they have a jail break scheme for it. I have ALL the goodies that 3.0 has with a jail broken phone.

 

That would have been very nice - to transfer & integrate address info as well. I think 'they' (who is that anyway?) need to open-source the built-in nav SW so we hack to our heart's content I also think we need a video in so we could actually see the iphone UI on the nav screen !

 

I thought you are getting Prius III. It does have bluetooth hands- free but the audio streaming feature is only listed in the Navigation package. I guess you can confirm Prius III without Nav also support bluetooth audio streaming.

 

Can you stream pandora, last fm or slacker?

 

It looks as though the non-Nav version of the III will pair with the iPhone, but not much else. I cannot get music to stream, nor can I get any contacts to the car. I tried both iPhone versions: 3.0 and 2.x. Has anyone done this? Have I missed anything?!

 

That's right. The non-nav version will only allow you to pair it for hands free phone operation. Bluetooth streaming is not supported. As for contacts, you also cannot transfer contacts over. However, what you can do is program up to 20 contacts with voice tags so you can use voice command to dial them. This is separate from the phone and must be done one by one in the car. Six of these contacts can be assigned as speed dial numbers.

All in all, your problem is not with what version of the iphone OS you are running but with the bluetooth support that a non-nav car has.

 

OP: what tethering have you set up ? I am under the impression that ATT does not allow it (yet).

 

Thanks for the early report, Mike.

I was hoping to have use of the steering wheel controls w/ bluetooth, so your finding is a bit disappointing. Still, it will be much easier than using the physical hook-up.

One question: If you are listening to music or a podcast and you are interrupted by an incoming call, does the system pause the music or podcast for the duration of the call?

 

Good question - I just stepped outside to test.

Basically, yes - but it's not so smooth.

First - I started off with Pandora running. I turned on the car and was surprised to see it connect and play pandora over the speakers - for about two seconds before it switched over to iTunes. I quit iTunes, went back to Pandora, and sure enough Pandora kept on playing without interruption. Note that if you turned off the car and started it again, it'll reconnect to the iPhone and start playing iTunes again. Not so bad so far.

The not-so-smooth part - at first there was a little skipping in the song, and after it evened out, it seemed like the sound quality suffered a lot more with Pandora. My initial guess is that all the extra bandwidth of having a wireless stream out AND a wireless stream in is forcing the connection to negotiate a lower bit rate and/or higher compression. It could an IO bottleneck forcing this, or it could be CPU bound - having the phone decompress the Pandora input and simultaneously recompress it for A2DP.

The audio quality was bad enough that I didn't consider it listenable. I'm not the kind of audio-phool who believes in the merits of $40 speaker cables, but I am very into sound. In summary, streaming Pandora over A2DP to the Prius might be viable to you if you can handle listening to 96kbps mp3s. It's possible that the new 3GS with it's extra 200Mhz of CPU has enough horsepower to keep up with transcoding both the Pandora input and the A2DP output simultaneously we'll have to see about that next week.


Hope this helps...
Dave

 

Yes, just like when the Gen II when using the Dice connector, or the headphone to aux-input. I did notice some lag on the call initiation after the music stopped when I received a call yesterday - but it was my little sister calling with her Gen II Prius and her Gen 1 iPhone on the other line. It could have been on her end...

I did notice that this phone call had more latency than usual - I think that having the A2DP audio connection - even though not in use - was adding a hair more latency to the phone conversation.

 

I appreciate the response, but I don't know whether I posed the question the right way, so I'm not certain your post answered the question I wanted to ask (sorry!).

In my '07, and in my 2010 (as far as I can tell, that is), if I am listening to music/podcast on my iPhone, and it is hooked up by a cable to the AUX port, then the sound goes off when a call comes in. BUT, when the call is over and the sound returns to the iPhone music/podcast, the music or podcast selection doesn't appear to have been paused by the call. Instead it has continued going through the duration of the call.

I'm just wondering if that changes by using Bluetooth audio streaming.

 

Good question, but the answer is probably not, unless the JBL system is shielded from wireless interference... like in the Ford Fusion, which connects to the iPhone via dock (the best way to do it). I guess this problem will be solved with the Prius iPod connector available after September?

 

Indy, You will only be getting the bluetooth phone features with your bluetooth, is that correct? I thought I understood that only the NAVI equipped systems would get the bluetooth audio streaming. If this is the case, then you would only have the Audio input to play from your iPhone.

Have they changed their offerings? Or if not, are you installing an aftermarket bluetooth system? I may be wrong here?