I love my car. Really, I do. It’s great, economical, fairly sporty, and has a load of space in the back for Aimee and her copious paraphenalia. It has lots of toys – like parking sensors, dual climate control and loads of three-letter-acronymns that I don’t fully understand (like ABS, EBD, ESP, TCS and so on), it also has a bluetooth mobile phone system, built in. The phone system is one of the reasons I bought the car – what with doing quite a bit of travelling, and the ban on using mobiles in cars. Everything is great in the car, absolutely wonderful German quality – except this phone system.
Firstly, the number of phones it supports is meagre at best – most of which are old and retired now. None of the Nokia E or N-series phones (or indeed, any Series 60 Symbian phones) are supported – though that’s a Nokia issue, rather than an Audi one, which they’ve only just fixed with the E71 and N96.
Secondly, when you have a compatible phone, and you wish to utilize the Audi’s wonderful voice-activated controls, it all turns to goopy shit. To illustrate this, I recorded my attempt this morning at trying to dial my voicemail box using the voice controls. All the car needs to do, is dial ‘901′.
Apologies for the quality of the recording, it was done by using another phone’s Voice Recorder and then exporting the audio off.