[dib669]

I have a new F20 with the Internet option. As the on board SIM appears to only give an EDGE (at best) connection, does anyone know how to connect to the internet using data tethering (personal hotspot) on an iPhone?

I can't get it to work, even though there is plenty of info to suggest it should be straightforward providing the personal hotspot is enabled before connecting the phone to the car.

Thanks.

[wolz]

I got the bmw live option that only utilize the phones data-connection (data tethering). Was straight forward for me. I got iphone 4s, just went into settings -> general -> network ->internetsharing -> enable. The terms I use might not correspond exactly to your phone, I roughly translated from swedish to english.

But! I'm not sure it will be any quicker compared to using the sim-card and its edge-connection because the phone and car communicate through bluetooth, not wifi. Although newer versions of BT got good transferrates, I'm not sure the car support that or if it's on old std BT version 1.0 or something.

When I load pictures on the i-drive screen through google-panaromio or maps from google-maps, it's pretty slow and laggy. Might just aswell be the "idrive/bmw-OS" that is slow and laggy rather than transfer-rate. Hard to tell.

I'll try browsing around in the bmw-live options when I'm on full 3g connection on the phone... see if it makes any difference with the phone on gsm or 3g. I haven't paid attention to what connection the phone is on when I'm using bmw live, just noticed it's always pretty slow, even at loading rss-feeds. Don't think I've been on slow gsm all the times I've used it. And even if I was, rss-feeds are such a small amount of data it should be quick anyway. I'm afraid we'll have to wait for some optimized/quicker i-drive version.

[dib669]

Thanks Wolz. I think I was seduced by the gadgetry instead of saving myself £95 for an option that I don't really need and, now that I've got it, I'm trying to make the best of it!

[wolz]

think you made a good choice your car is future-ready having that connectivity. Even if you don't find it really usefull now, there might come functionality down the road that we don't think of now that you might appreciate.

The functions I really enjoy and use most among the live-functions I have are the rss-feeds. That alone justify the small cost of the option imo. I have a traffic-info-feed that is updated all the time, so all those times when you end up in a massive traffic-jam and sit there wondering what the heck is going on, I go into bmw-live, bring up my traffic rss-feed and right away can get a nice report about what happened. That way I can tell if it's a major thing like a truck flipped all over the road (time to take first exit and make a de-tour) or if it's a minor thing I might stay in line and bring up the top-news feeds to kill a couple of minutes of boring queing

and while driving around, why not have the weather-forecast displayed on the screen, or a nice picture from panaromio acting as sort of a screensaver/wallpaper instead of having the boring menu or radiochannel-list displayed on the screen.

Not like it's super-must-have-stuff, but I do appreciate some functions and I encourage bmw to keep on providing those little not-important-but-cool extra goodies.