MMI & SAP BT annoyances with SMS messages

[ChrisB]

OK, anyone with MMI and the SAP Bluetooth kit (Phone prep high) noticed somethign really odd with the SMS functionality?

I've got two cars with MMI+SAP (the RS 6 and allroad) and me and the wife have Nokia 6500 Classic phones, which seem to work fine. The phones pair up, the SAP functionality works, the "Phone book" reads the phone and SIM directory entries just fine.

However, there are two slightly annoying things:

1. The call lists are for the car, and aren't synchronised with the phone.

2. SMS messages received in the car are kept in the car and aren't visible on the phone after disconnecting.

This gets annoying, because if somebody sends me a text while I'm in the car and it has some detail I need later, I need to write it down to take it out with me - not great in today's technical age!

There is an oddity in the behaviour though. If the SMS behaviour means the SMS messages are kept in the car's memory, not the phone, why are unread and read messages received while in the car not available for some length of time after conencting? This is really noticable with my wife's phone, as the BT antenna on it is a bit dicky and the range is about 10cm! When she receives an SMS in the car, if the BT drops before you read it, once you re-connect BT it takes a few minutes before the unread SMS appears again, almost as if it's being read from the phone via BT.

Now here's the really strange part. My wife jumped in the RS 6 the other morning, and there was eight unread SMS messages, some 'received' when I had the RS 6 some 45 miles away! These were ones that she thought had been sent to her and never received - some of them were weeks old!

So, those of you with SAP-capable phones connected to your MMI+BT high kits, can you read SMS messages you received on the phone through MMI, and can you read SMS messages received in the car via the phone?

If I could find a replacement phone that allowed me to keep messages received in the car on the phone, that would be ideal. If the kit just doesn't work that way, I want to know why on earth not!

[ChrisB]

An update (might help somebody, you never know!): Strange behaviour explained, and it's not all Audi's fault!

First, the SIM Access Profile bit is a sort of clue - even though it can read the phone memory for the Contacts/Directory entries, it can only read and write SMS messages from/to the SIM, and not the phone memory.

Secondly, it appears the Nokia 6500 Classic phone can only read/write SMS messages from/to the phone memory and not the SIM, even though it can read/write Contacts from/to the SIM...

So, either Audi need to make the BT High kit read/write phone memories too, or Nokia need ot make a phone that can read/write the SIM memory!

Second thing, having traded the allroad in against an S5 recently, I was quite pleased to find that I had been automatically upgraded by thefactory to the late 2008 spec - LED rear lights, LED turn indicators in the door mirrors, and most importantly 3G MMI with HDD storage, DVD playback and two SD card slots and a SIM slot in the dash. This unit also pairs up fine with the 6500c, and low and behold the same SMS messages that I see in the RS 6 are visible (from the SIM then), but by the look of it the call lists are the ones from the phone, where the RS 6 seems to be keeping a separate set of call lists. This gives me hope though, that an upgrade to MMI could make the RS 6 behave the same way if Audi choose to do so.