I have about 1600 business related contacts on my iPhone. It takes a while for these to sync each time I get into the car. Do these have to sync every time I return to the car?
Also, I have 4-6 redundant copies of each contact when I go to the address book. I do not have this redundancynon my iPhone. Can anyone help? Have you experienced this too?

 

Yeah, they have to sync every time; the car isn't designed to store them. Syncing more than 800-1,000 contacts is known to cause some weirdness.

You should get a contact list entry for each telephone number of each contact, eg: home work and mobile numbers each as a separate contact. That might explain your redundant numbers, or there could be other issues -possibly related to the number of contacts.

 

You can store some numbers in the car but you have to do it manually. I stored my frequently used numbers to speed up the sync process.

 

You can fairly easily mark phone contacts to be transferred to the car's "Office" module. You click on each phone contact and if I recall correctly, go to options or scroll down or something and there is an action to copy to cars directory.

 

Thanks all for your replies. I really like the feature. I'll check out your suggestions.

 

For iPhone users, there is potentially a simpler solution. Assuming you already have a list of Favorites, on your phone go to Settings> General> Bluetooth> and then tap on the Blue arrow next to your MINI that's paired to the phone. You will then get a menu of options regarding which groups of phone numbers you want synced (Phone Favorites, Phone Recents, Other Groups). To speed up the syncing of only your frequently used phone numbers, just turn on Favorites and Phone Recents, but don't include Other Groups. If you want to include a larger universe of contacts for syncing, you could create a new group in your address book of your more important contacts (e.g. name it MINI or Car) and include that group in the bluetooth sync menu.

Based on my experience, when you go to your MINI phone book you get one listing per name. When you highlight a name, you then get the option of choosing any of the numbers that have been stored for that particular name (home, work, cell, etc). Your phone book list also syncs automatically to Office. Hope this helps.

 

Ah, crud. I'd completely forgotten about all the changes with Connected guys, sorry. I was thinking of the older system, please ignore my post!

 

This only works for VERY limited number of phones from what I have heard and read on other forums. And iPhone is not one of them from what I am reading.

I am only guessing here but I would suspect that it only works with phones that will pass more than just name and number via the Bluetooh Hands Free Profile. There are a limited number of phones that do pass this info.

If anyone can prove differently that would be a great help to all of us.

 

I didn't say anything about passing more than name and number... I'll have to check to see which data bits moved over but at a minimum name and phone numbers did move. I am using a BlackBerry Storm2. Not exatcly the latest technology nor listed as a supported device.

 

There IS other information that the Office will hold for contacts other than name and number such as a picture etc. So if the phone does not support transfer of that other information (which the blackberrys do) then it may not work. I am not saying for sure that it will not work but I have read reports that for some phones it does not.

 

With my iPhone 4, Office will upload for each synced contact all phone numbers (home, work, cell, etc), company name, as well as home, work and email addresses. Pictures aren't transferred.

 

Thanks to everyone for your help. The Bluetooth Mini preferences helped with limiting the number of contacts that need to sync. In addition, my iPhone had duplicate contact lists from both MobileMe and my Mac. I fixed that and along with your recommendations, voila!
Thanks.