So, I'm a huge fan of my Mini Countryman, but one thing that usually leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth is trying to find a location in the navigation software. It's just such a pain to have to spell out the name of the location with the dial interface and then sit there waiting for it to search (which often returns zero results).

Meanwhile, my iPhone can find the location almost immediately. So here's the question - is there any way for me to pick a location on my phone, either through the native maps app or Google Maps, and get the navigation system in my Mini. Please note that doing this over Bluetooth would be my preferred way, I hate having to plug my phone in.

Was thinking that, if there's nothing straight-forward, then maybe I could leverage my contacts or something along those lines. Anyone have any suggestions?

(Specifics - Mini Countryman 2016 w/ connected, smartphone, and bluetooth packages, iPhone 6s Plus)

 

If you can receive and make calls on your 6s plus; the answer is YES. Open google maps.
Drill down to "Settings". Select "Navigation settings". Select "Play voice over Bluetooth".
Select "Play as Bluetooth phone call". s
Search google maps application for your desired location ("coffee"); select that store; start navigation to desired location AND turn by turn directions play over in-car speakers!

 

Excellent solution, and it works just fine. The one downside is that I don't get to use the centre console map with navigation info displayed. Also I usually stream my music/audiobooks from my phone and this impacts playback (volume is silenced during instructions, and when playing back an audiobook, that means that I miss a few sentences).

What I've done in the meantime is set up one contact on my phone, "iPhone destination". Using the native Apple map app (yeah, yeah, I know it sucks, it's just easier to add contact info using it). When I pick my destination, I add it to that contact. Then, in my Mini, I open my contacts list, find the destination contact, and set the address. The downsides here are that I need to remove the destination from my contact on the phone after I get there, or else they can pile up, and it sometimes takes a couple of minutes for the new contact info to refresh on the Mini side.

It would just be so much nicer if there were some kind of "send to Mini" option in Apple/Google Maps, or if the Mini could have a "fetch destination" function to grab navigation data from the phone. Of course, that's wishful thinking.

 

Go to Google.com/maps type the address in and you have a choice to send it to your car/phone. You can pick it up through the connected app.

 

Two questions - can this still only be done via PC, and does the phone need to be plugged in to fully use this feature of the Connected app? Either one would be a deal breaker for me.

Also, I see a lot of reports that this functionality was removed from the Connected app. Has it been restored?