bought a 2012 Countryman S, no Nav or Mini Connect but it does have Bluetooth. I synced my Samsung phone and phonebook and all works fine except when I voice dial it says "phonebook is empty" but I know its not because I can see phonebook entries on the display. Am I missing something or do you have to use the display to place a call?

 

The car has it's own "phone book" that is separate from the one on the phone that shows up in the display. It's voice based. Mine is a 2013 CMS without MINI Connected or nav and I finally figured out how to use the voice dialing. Here's what I did.
>Press the voice button on the steering wheel and say "help". The system will respond with commands that you can give it.
>Press the voice button on the wheel again and give it the command to create a new entry (I forget off the top of my head what it is, thus the first suggestion to say help). It will ask you for the name you want to save and the phone number, which you will speak in response.
I noticed that mine would not (or could not) allow me to record certain names. For instance, I tried to save the name "dad" with my voice, but it would just say "system off" and exit. So I had to come up with work arounds for those names that it would not record in it's list.
I think I have about 8 or so names that I would frequently call. I don't know the limit on how many names can be saved though.
I had the same kind of system on my VW Touareg, so I was familiar with the concept. However, it worked much better on the Touareg. The first few times I tried saving names (like "dad") to the CMS it kept saying "system off" and I became a bit frustrated with it, but then learned to work around it's limitations.
Cheers.

 

Thanks enigmaintx. Good timing with the question victoryrider, I was just about to dive into the voice commands on my 2011 CMS.