iPhone 5 to GN2

[Tsaar]

In 2010 I bought my first smart phone. I am married to AT&T, and at that time the Android selection was terrible for them. I bought an iPhone 4. I don't regret the decision. It was a solid phone and served me well.

In 2012 my contract was up and I was really wanting to get a new phone. There were no details on the N4 or the GN2 at the time. I am also not interested in the GS3 because of a retarded reason (I hate how round the device looks...I like bezels to run parallel with the screen). So...I bought an iPhone 5. A few weeks later the GN2 was unveiled. Sigh.

I actually tried to return my phone, but AT&T has some 15 day return policy now. Somehow in all of my talks with AT&T they accidently reset my upgrade eligibility. So I can buy a new phone with a contract at any time. Best Buy is currently offering $410 for perfect trade in (my iPhone is flawless due to screen protector and case). I will then buy a GN2 on contract for $300.

My wife has an iPhone, so we will lose the convenience of iCloud and FaceTime, but I will transition us to Dropbox and Skype.

My main questions have to do with my car (2010 3 series). It has a USB and 3.5mm input.

1) With my iPhone, I plug in the phone and switch to Aux/iPhone using my steering wheel and I am ready to go. Will an Android device allow me to plug and play like this?

2) With my iPhone I can be talking on my phone and as soon as I get in my car and power it up, the phone auto switches to the car speakers through BT. Will I lose this convenience?

3) If I hold down my home button for Siri to do a voice text or get directions, the BT actually kicks in and let's me do it through my car. Will S-Voice provide this also? Clearly texting and driving is not something I will do, but Siri has been awesome for those times I want to yell at my wife while driving and she won't talk to me so I have to resort to text messages.

The great thing about Siri over Bluetooth is she automatically reads my message back to me when driving since she knows I cannot read it at the time.

 

[lopri]

1) Does the car come with the 30-pin iPhone cable built-in? My car (VW Passat) does and it doesn't work with Android. (there is no 30-pin receptacles!) But I am actually having a different (yet related) problem with my Android because every time I start my car it starts playing music from my Nexus 7 even though my Nexus wasn't playing music. Haven't figured out how to stop it from happening. It could be that there is some sort of trigger that used to work with iPhone is being confused.

2) No. Bluetooth works all the same whether it's iPhone or Nexus (see above)
3) Not sure how S-Voice works. My car bascially takes over sound (voice and multimedia) and acts like a speaker. I hear notification sounds, phone rings, etc. but in order to hear the voice message I will have to pull down the notification shade and press "Play" icon.

I am a very much Android novice, so my answers are likely inconclusive.

 

[Markbnj]

So far my experience is that s-voice doesn't work over bluetooth with my s3. Meaning, if I have the phone connected to a hands-free device then the s-voice app does not take input from the external microphone, and doesn't get it from the hands-free device either.

 

[Midwayman]

1) This is really dependent on the car. If you're asking if steering wheel controls like skip forward work. If you just want to hook the phone up through the 3.5mm TRS jack for audio and charge the phone off USB it'll work for sure.

2) Yup, bluetooth will work the same here.

3) This is a bit dependent on the car. Some cars won't pass the mic to the phone for voice commands. You'd be better off going to a BMW forums and asking the question of someone with the specific year and model of car you have. I highly suspect it'll work if it works for an iphone, but can't give you a for sure answer.

 

[Riceninja]

S-voice does not work with my 2010 x5, just checked.

 

[Tsaar]

I have been doing some research, and it seems that S-Voice comes out as stereo. If your vehicle does not support media streaming over BT then S-Voice will not work. There are some apps that will force all BT communications to be mono and this apparently this allows S-Voice over the car speakers. I may also dabble in some Android development and see if I can't make my own app to do this.

I have a Nexus 7, and I loaded in music. My car does mount it as a USB drive, but since there are many directories, it is definitely annoying compared to an iPhone (such as no ability to select "Play All" in a single folder...the only way to play all was have it play sound/music files from every directory which also includes system sounds). This hopefully would be circumvented by the fact that all my media files will be located on the SD drive with a GN2 (I am crossing my fingers that I can mount the SD drive instead of the main drive, but have no way to test this).

I may just buy a cheap iPod and keep it in my car as a permanent music repository, and just plug in my phone to the auxiliary input when I want Audible.

With an iPhone I was already manually controlling Audible on the phone screen, so there will be no change there (the Audible app has a gestures view so you can perform many actions while driving without ever looking down). The main inconvenience will be music, which can be circumvented with a cheap iPod (I am hopeful the SD card fixes this). I am tired of Apple, and really hate my iPhone, so I think this will be worth it.