So, what phone works?

Hate, and I mean Hate, all the carriers. I swear the reason you can't get decent signal all the time on any of them is that each other's towers block out the competing signal.

That being said, I'm with AT&T wireless, which has decent (comparatively speaking) coverage for this area, but stupid cutout points like the rest. My old T68i works with the car, takes a bit of setup (it's a Sony Ericsson), but haven't had any problems. the other Sonys that I know work are the T616, and I promise you the Ericsson P800 & P900 (smartphones) don't work with the car. So, that's what I have, and it works - hope this helps some.

-m.

 

i am not sure which ones definitely work but i am hoping the new motorola MPX will... my treo300 doesn't have bluetooth, but then i don't have a prius yet either

http://www.brighthand.com/article/Motorola...rst_Impressions

 

As posted elsewhere, the official list of tested BT phones can be found and purchased directly at http://toyota.letstalk.com

 

I noted an earlier post that recommended the Nokia 6820.

Verizon does not have a bluetooth phone yet, but I am told they will have some overpriced one by the end of the year.

 

I had awful an experience with the T616, although i'm in the minority (although not the only one). I replaced it with the Nokia 3650, which has had relatively great connectivity and audio for me.

I'm using AT&T Wireless, which was my only option this area.

Try before you buy! Or buy from Amazon, who let me do a lot of replacements.

 

Just in the last week or so, my Nokia 6820 has started working with both AT&T and CINGULAR towers, (I noticed this when we were driving to Santa Cruz last week... kept switching beteween one and the other on I5 south of Sac.)... and a lot of deadspots (such as the local "in n out burger" along the interstate used to be totally DEAD on AT&T GSM. Grrr.) aren't dead any more. (It was OK on TDMA... and now is OK again with Cingular added to the mix)

AT&T had both TDMA and GSM. The 6820 is GSM (as is, I think, all of Cingular's system). Also if you're getting a GSM phone, you probably want a dual-band one. Lots of new expansion on the lower (850 MHZ) band. As of about 2 motns ago, AT&T was only selling dual band GSM phones... and all their bluetooth phones were GSM. It may have changed, I haven't checked.

I haven't got my Prius yet (ordered Aug from Carson) to try it, so I can't speak as to how well it works, but I thought the comment on carriers might help... especially if you're in an area served by both.

 

my SE T608 works fine.

 

I have just spent the last month changing services and phones to get something that works with my Prius. Long story short, in New Orleans, T-Mobile sucks. Zero service in many places throughout town, including my office and my wifes office. Now I'm with AT&T. Anyway, thru this process (tried 8 different phones), I can report that the SE T616 has great bluetooth compatability but fairly bad general reception. The Nokia 3600 has iffy Bluetooth, and iffy reception. The Nokia 6820 has limited bluetooth functionality but much better general reception. In order to transfer the phonebook to my Prius with the 6820, I had to send them one at a time (business card). Since a wanted a phone first and everything else second, I think I'll stay with the 6820.

Jay

 

My sony T608 works fine. I was able to convert it to Verizon from Sprint.

 

Motorola V600 works very well.
Contract extension through AT&T. GSM network.

 

The Sony Ericsson 608 works beautifully with the car. It is a Sprint phone and available directly from Sprint telesales. See the post I made earlier today in this forum about details on getting it.

Paul

 

OK, I've been using the T616 (Cingular) for about 3 months now and thus far the voice quality has been fuzzy (as noted above by someone else) and incoming calls did seem to occasionally disconnect on their own.

I've been leaving the Bluetooth turned on in the phone settings, so usually when I get into the car and start it up, I get the 'Bluetooth connected successfully' message after several seconds.

Yesterday, the connection failed when I got into the car with the BT on. This was the first time the connection had completely failed. I cycled power to the T616, and it connected, but the MFD display showed 'out of range' for signal strength, although the phone itself showed 5 bars solid. At this point, the MFD phone functions wouldn't work since it thought there was no signal.

I then deleted my phone from the Prius phone settings menu and reinstalled it through the discovery process, which worked as it had originally. The T616 once again connected right away and the phone
functions worked. The extremely odd thing, however, is that ever since
then, the voice quality over the speakers seems to have improved
significantly over what I had before, much crisper and clearer. I've
also not had any calls drop on me, and I've used it quite a bit in the past two days.

Is it at all possible that the initial discovery phase that detects your phone and what information it supports through BT may not have been entirely correct, but sufficient to make the connection and work with degraded performance? I know it's a stretch, but I can't explain the change otherwise.

 

Sony P900

Hi all- its been sometime and I am still hoping someone has had luck connecting with a P900. I've heard that they don't work, but from my searches its only hearsay and no one has actually tried it personally, at least lately. Anyone have some new experiences to share about connecting a P900 to the Prius?

Patrick

 

BT phones

I use a Siemens S56 phone. It works good. I use Cingular and haven't found any dead spots yet. It is rather difficult to transfer your address book to the car.

 

Re: So what phone works?

Well, I've got a sideways sort of question to this (and I guess it sort of complements it in a way)... If I were to get one of those PDAs that is also a phone that has Bluetooth in it, for example, a new phone coming out from HP (iPaq 6300, supposed to have every wireless technology in the book in it, whee!); would something like this work with the Prius? Even though this is a PDA, its a phone (this sounds like an SNL sketch coming on here)...

-= Dave =-

PS: It's a floor wax AND a dessert topping!!!

 

Re: So what phone works?

It depends whether it supports the "Handsfree" profile. I did't spend too much time looking but didn't see the info in my brief search.

 

Re: BT phones

I'll second this, the S56 is a great little phone. Other than some "issues" transfering the phone book, which is more than likely due to a semi brain-dead implementation of the bluetooth protocol on the Prius side, it works wonderfully with the car.

Not only does it work wonderfully with the car, it's just a feature packed phone for the price (speakerphone, voice dialing, browser, color, games). The bluetooth on it works flawlessly with all of the devices I've thrown at it. For example, I use it to sync my address book with the palm, and it'll send the entire book back and forth.

I'm using it with Cingular, which has good coverage in the NJ area. I understand they've bought AT&T wireless, so the two networks should be merging shortly.

 

I have the new Sony Ericsson T637 with AT&T. First the new GSM coverage from AT&T is great. The bluetooth conenction and sync with the T637 is much better that the T681 I had.