I've finally had enough of the turd masquerading as a Bluetooth system in my 2008 XKR. My phone is a 2009 LG so you would think I would have less problems than with a new 'phone. However, yet again it failed to connect to an incoming call, and I think it might have been law enforcement wanting me to confirm the location of a road hazard. The 'phone's directory loads just fine and it connects and dials out just fine, but there is something wrong in the receive call side of things.

Good grief, they can get it to work on a poxy Walmart Blutooth headset, but not at Jaguar. Not a great loss as I've never been one for yakking on the 'phone while driving.

 

I've read several complaints about Jaguar's Bluetooth connectivity, however, mine works perfectly with my iPhone. In fact, it works far better than with my Lexus, which doesn't accept my phone book download. The sound quality is also much better in the jag.

 

This is probably why the system's foibles make me so cross. When it works it works REALLY well. Everybody who has heard me on it has said so, and passengers riding with me have commented the same.

When it fails on incoming calls it tells the 'phone to pick up the call but fails to connect the audio to the car. THAT'S frustrating, because now the caller think I can hear them but I cannot, nor am I speaking via the car microphone as far as I can tell. There is a fix but it involves rooting through the nav submenus, not Plan A on the freeway. If it refused to pick up incoming calls altogether at least the caller would be able to leave a voicemail.

 

Do you think it's a compatibility problem with your particular phone, or a system problem?

 

The car is a 2008, and the list of mobiles approved by Jaguar to work with their system is laughably short. MANY folk on here have had issues with the Bluetooth on the 07-09 model, and all report radical indifference from Jaguar on the subject. One theory is that the Bluetooth radio module was supplied by the lowest bidder and is some hard wired piece that cannot be reprogrammed or upgraded.

 

As I have posted on the "Gremlins from low voltage..." thread, my 2008 XK will dock and then un-dock, over and over again. This is a new POS problem that is making my head explode!

I can't imagine that this problem cannot be solved by upgrade or reprogramming. I was also wondering if there is a way to do a soft reset of the cars system?

 

I have a LG VX 5600 flip phone in my 2008 XKR and as you say it works fine when dialing out. But now that you mention it, I have had problems with incoming calls. It doesn't pick up when I hit the phone button on the steering wheel like my 2007 XK did but then I noticed that there was an "accept" or "ignore" on the NAV screen and when I touch "accept" the call comes through but there seems to be a lag before I can hear them. I thought I just didn't have it set up right and never tried to figure it out since I rarely get calls on my cell.

Sorry I can't be of more help but is there anybody out there that has a non LG phone that is experiencing this same problem so we can figure out if this is a LG problem or something with the system?

 

The Jag system works great with iPhones, but not with HTC based phones. I'm not sure whether that includes the LG, but it includes HTC, Sony and a few more. I just got a Galaxy Note 3, and after a couple of initial foibles it seems to be running fine.

 

Stick with an iPhone. Phone choices for this Jag really suck. Only thing keeping me to an iPhone is the XK.

 

My current phone is simply a phone, nothing else. It is almost contemporary with the car in terms of age, so the fact that the Bluetooth systems are incompatible is just asinine.

Then there is the goat rope that is the Bluetooth "standard". Check out this thread about how well that worked when Windows Phone 8 came out. It's only 47 pages. WP8 Pairing Issues with Car's Bluetooth - Microsoft Community

Cliff notes: Microsoft could not implement Bluetooth if their lives depended on it, and they screwed the pooch so badly that their flagship Nokia 920 phone would not even communicate with cars fitted with Sync, ANOTHER MICROSOFT PRODUCT.

The funniest one in that mess for me is the guy in the UK who was told by his GM dealer, "Yes, our handsfree system meets the Bluetooth standard. Nokia met the same standard but their implementation is different and it won't work in our cars". W.T.F. over????? If they are both supposedly compliant, why can't they communicate? Either the folk that issue compliance accreditation are getting it wrong, or the standard is so badly written that it allows gross incompatibilities. Pick your poison.

Furthermore, the only way I will ever own any kind of alleged smart phone is if my employer supplies it and writes it into my contract that I am required to use it.

 

The "standard" could have been better. It wasn't. Makers could have got together to make sure these problems didn't occur. They didn't.

 

Having spent most of my career gently beating my brains against the incompatibilities of different implementations of various "universal" communications standards, I can assure you that Bluetooth is just another in that noble heritage. Think of a standard as a contract, which is being interpreted by different sets of lawyers - and you know how that goes.

The iPhone is a perfectly adequate phone, if that's all you need; no one forces you to use the 'smart' features. If those are no use to you, you don't need to pay for a current model; a secondhand 3GS or 4 should be just fine for XK Bluetooth compatibility.

 

I'd had iPhones for years and loved them, my wife and kids have them too. But I made the mistake of upgrading to ios7 which is truly BS and lost half of the functionality in what I want to do (which isn't much) and then couldn't roll back. So instead of getting the iPhone 5 which comes with ios7, my new phone is the Galaxy Note 3 which I'm getting used to, but seems pretty good. I read a lot of emails on the phone anyway, so the massive screen is useful. But I did like the iPhone 4, with ios6.

 

What a polite way of putting it.

Mind if I give the less politically correct cliff notes? Some of you may wish to back away from the screen at this point.

1) The writers of the Bluetooth (cough, gag, retch) "standard" left way to much slop in their specs.

2) Even if the standard were nailed down at the edges, the control freaks in the industry would still be trying to do their own thing and then using us a beta testers for their crap that won't connect.

I think this icon sums up the IT and "connected" industry very well. They just cannot leave stuff that works alone, it must be fixed worse.

Another example came up tonight. I was just about to hit the "Check for Updates" button in Firefox when I thought I would check the Web for comments on the latest version. There are now skid marks on the keyboard from where my finger narrowly avoided the return key.