Alpine Telephone Function

[bingoking]

Does anyone have any idea in what order the Alpine unit stores telephone numbers.

I have over 650 contacts on my iPhone (only 122 pages x 4 stored on Alpine) and some of these contacts have multiple telephone numbers stored on my iPhone according to the type of number. ie.e Mobile, Home, Work, Work 2, Fax, Assistant etc.

My contacts synchronise with my PC contacts over Exchange Server 2007 so any updates my secretary makes when I am away from the office automatically synchronises with my iPhone when out and about..

The first screen shot is what I get when I select Phone book and it appears to be ordered alphabetically by phone number type i.e. Car then Home and then by the contacts name. I add the 001 or 011 so that my family numbers are always at the top of my contacts list in Exchange

The second screen appears when keypad is selected but why is it not QWERTY Is it possible to select a UK keyboard layout?

Now the confusing bit. This screen appears when I select any letter between A and F

This screen appears when I select any letter between G and M

and this screen appears when any letter between N and Z is selected

I have played about with sorting my contacts on the iPhone by last name, first name and also by recategorising the type of telephone number but the list in Apline makes no sense at all and the searhes are just as confusing.

Anyone else having any problems like this or have any suggestions?

Sorry to ask these questions but the Alpine handbook is silent on the Telephone Function as far as I can see.

Overall the unit is just OK. The radio signal keeps dropping out but SatNav is basically ok apart from the poor graphics.

I am enjoying the car immensely and now that the first service is past I can exploit the rev range and the sound of that wonderful sports exhaust.

[Myfavedave]

I'm having this exact same problem with my iPhone. Did you ever find a solution?

[bingoking]

What I did to get round this was to copy my frequently dialed numbers to the SIM card using my old phone a Nokia 6200, connect that to the Alpine via bluetooth, download the phone book from the SIM card to the Alpine unit, then unchecked the Download phonebook automatically box, put the SIM card back in my iPhone, connected to Alpine via bluetooth and hey presto my frequently dialed numbers were available and I was able to search the phonebook alphabetically.

I am currently have an HTC Desire on test and set the Alpine unit to read the SIM card and that works OK and the phonebook does update automatically.

My next upgrade is due in February and I will be going back to iPhone so hopefully iPhone 4 will be better than my old iPhone 3G.

Hope this helps.

Edited November 18, 2010 by bingoking

[Myfavedave]

I'm using an iPhone 4 and it works perfectly -except for this contacts list problem.

Unfortunately I can't move my contacts on to the Sim as I have about 400 contacts in my phone!! Not that I call them all regularly... maybe I can find a spare phone and try doing that with the most commonly used.

Seems a bit crap that the Alpine can't change the order they're displayed in. Have you installed the version 2 software? Even though I bought my car three days ago, it's still got 2008 maps on it!

[bingoking]

I have installed version 2 and updated my maps and speed cameras.

I am sure I read on here that if you register the unit within 10 days of it first acquiring a GPS signal you can get a free map updrade. Check with your dealer he may know.

I wasn't aware of that and there was no information in the box.

Edited November 19, 2010 by bingoking

[Myfavedave]

I've just updated my Alpine to have the free map and software upgrade.

Not sure how long that would last for, but when I connected it to the PC it did it all for me

[Myfavedave]

One thing to be aware of if you're planning on transferring contacts from an iPhone 4 to the Alpine: The iPhone 4 uses a mini-sim, so you can't put it in another phone without an adapter.

So, I tried a different method... After creating a new login on my Mac to duplicate the address book and stripping out 300 of my 351 contacts, I found an old Sony phone and bluetoothed the remaining contacts from my Mac to the Sony, then transferred the phonebook from the Sony into the Alpine.

I still ended up with the same problem, the contacts were listed in the wrong order and with 'M', 'W' prefixes for Mobile / home etc. Ultimately I couldn't get around this, although by changing the Sony contacts to sort 'Surname first', the contacts became sorted by first name on the Alpine. Weird.

It's a pretty poor interface really. Something that could easily have been done by a simple 'sort by first name' function on the Alpine, took me the best part of half a day to get a half-arsed result. Oh well. At least the car is good.