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Originally Posted by soulfunk
I've also heard back from a mate of mine who works with BMW, and tells me that according to my VIN, I will need the following bits;
BT integration - 269.00 GBP
iphone Integration - 336.00 GBP
iphone cradle - 90 GBP;
total 695.00 GBP
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Actually, you shouldn't need the iPhone cradle (and in fact, if you have an iPhone 5, you can't use it anyway, not sure if you do). Many people DO say it improves reception as it claims it does (some kind of antenna magic), but I personally wouldn't use it anyway since, if my phone's plugged in, it's sitting up high on a dash mount so I can control music and whatnot.
But anyway, not needing the phone cradle should save you 90 squids right there. As far as the other two quotes, those are retrofit kits containing many parts, but I don't know what each contains
. If I had to guess, BT contains Mic, mic wiring, and maybe antenna wiring for the cradle. iPhone integration contains the MULF, and probably only the MULF.
Depending on what wiring they have, it then becomes a question of whether your car is prewired for this stuff. I think all are for the MULF or TCU, but many AREN'T prewired for phone. Particularly, after MY 2008, they stopped including phone prewiring. But that's on US cars, I'm no expert on Euro cars. Can you run your VIN through something like
http://bmwvin.com/ and report back?
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If the costs were similiar for both, would it make more sense to go with OEM retrofit? I'm just thinking that the functionality would be better?
Thanks for any thoughts, and apologies for flogging a dead horse.
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It might make sense to see if you can track down a car with 6FL too. You can probably just ask a sales guy at your dealership to show you a car with one, but try to have them show you a used 06-10 WITHOUT SOS/BMW Assist, but WITH USB. BMW Assist is driven through a "combox," which replaces the "MULF" for USB and bluetooth functionality and is slightly different.
Anyway the reason I suggest this is because I think the integration look and feel is pretty much the same between the dension gateway and a MULF, except that the gateway has a better feature set. I am not 100% certain on that, though. It'd be a bummer to find out that the gateway doesn't show you track names or something (but I'm pretty sure it does).
And no worries! It helps to know what you're buying when you spend half a G, and there's no industry where it's harder to be sure about that than cars.