LarryQW

Occasionally, maybe once a month, my Droid looses BT and cannot pair with SYNC. In all cases, I've resolved it by turning off and on my Droid phone to reboot. It then pairs immediate.

Go into the SYNC settings menu on your phone screen. Lots of settings and options there. One of them is to manually download the phonebook now. Another is to turn off the automatic downloads.

I had a similar problem with my LG phone. Turns out the phone wants you to hit "Yes" to approve download of the phone book soon after connecting. If you don't, it disconnects after a minute. I fixed it by telling SYNC to only do manual downloads, which I do manually once a month or whenever I made a change to my phone book. Otherwise it automatically doesn't try to download and disconnect on pairing.

Verizon generally does not support text messaging via Bluetooth. However, a couple of the newer phones are able to text via Sync according to reports. I think one is the HTC. Not sure about Droid 2. You can read more over at the Owner to Owner forums at syncmyride.com, the official sync site. There's a new BT protocal that allows text to work if your phone supports it.

I previoiusly had that phone and it worked fine. The only issue was it knocking me off the SYNC after one minute if I didn't physicall press OK on my phone to accept the automatic Phone Address book update. I finally told SYNC to only do Manual updates and fixed that problem. Check your Phone's Bluetooth menu and check if it has everything enabled properly. Not sure what else.

OK, first the radio was already controlled by Pioneer's Nav system in the past, so MS SYNC worried about the other things. They made a hand-off to MS voice control when you go to the User Device or Phone sub-menu. You can tell because the sound level suddenly starts blasting. As for customized voice recognition, you can indeed set voice profiles for Pioneer's commands. You say a few phrases and it trains to understand your voice as you suggested. You can set profiles for different people and call them up. (To learn how, say Help.) I found the voice training helps considerably for Pioneer's commands, raising accuracy from say 75% to 95%. The MS voice commands don't have custom voice profiles, but don't need it . It's already 98% accurate for many different voices. Customizable buttons would be good. But what if someone else drove your car? You'd need some sort of default settings. I could be confusing to a driver and distraction if not done right. SYNC is now working on opening up their system to independently developed "Apps". But unlike a cell phone, the Apps have to be helpful and not distract from driving in their operation. As such, there will always be a very careful selection process much more stringent than anything Apple does. Many GPS and other systems allow changing of the navigator voice. At some point Ford may do this as well. (I want a voice to make my wife jealous of my car...) But for now the Navigation systems in the Fords are way out of date. My cheap hand held Garmin GPS has 6 Million Points of Interest. My Pioneer/Ford Nav system only has maybe 2.3 Million POIs. I can't even find local stores like an REI on Ford's system. So I look up the store on my handheld GPS, or now days, my Droid smart phone and punch the street address into the Ford Nav. The big advantage of the Ford/Pioneer Nav system is better integration, bigger screen, and all sorts of side advantages of the Nav Control, like being able to see Phone information and control the rear DVD from the front. It also will keep navigating based on wheels and steering wheel position when there's no satellite reception, like in big cities, tunnels and parking decks. It also nicely lowers the radio sound only on the front speakers when giving Nav commands. An external GPS would need to blast to be heard over the radio.

I was saying the rear screen is very dangerous if you only watch that screen and don't look around. The rear screen is maybe good for a brief glance to check behind you before starting out. But similarly, you can look behind the car before getting in. Backing out, you need to be looking around out the windows so you can see everything else that is happening - like a car coming from the side or a kid running to get behind your car, which your camera may not see until too late In contrast to the rear screen, the sensors will always work to your advantage to prevent accidents, rather than make them. They can audibly alert you to obstacles when you're not looking at the screen, which you shouldn't be while moving backwards. So again, I think it's far better and safer to disable the screen and keep the sensors working, rather than the other way around. And like you say - Yes, that's what I do.

It's a Verizon thing. Verizon disables text via Bluetooth on all their phones. I think it's to prevent "tethering" your laptop to the web through your phone, or maybe to force you to use their special web services rather than transfer content from your computer. I heard one phone model (Eclipse?) from Verizon was able to text with SYNC, but that was an anomaly.

Hi Brandy New! Verizon disables text over Bluetooth on all their phones. It's a Verizon policy, maybe to eliminate people tethering their phone to their laptop? As such, if you're with Verizon, none of their phones will do text over SYNC.

There's been a lot of discussion on this on www.syncmyride.com Owner-to-Owner forum. You need to type the password very quickly on the Droid before it times out. Using the hard keyboard helps to give more time and type faster. Some have found it's easier to start the pairing from the Droid, and then discover it on the SYNC menu.

Satellite Radio is about all I listen to while driving, unless it's my USB drive. Sirius made my 40 minute morning commute in traffic bearable as I can listen to all the news and financial stations that I I'd be reading at the computer anyway. It's also great on long family trips through nowhere. I didn't get the lifetime subscription until the second year, so I wasted a year of payments. I should have done it sooner. But I was worried about the Sirius going bankrupt. Then it was saved at the last minute and also merged with XM. Now I figure whoever owns Sirius will keep it going for the marginal cost with all the paying customers out there. Anyway, my point is that you should get the lifetime subscription as soon as you decide you want to keep the service. Over 10 years life of the car, it works out to maybe only $4/month.

I had a similar experience with my Taurus X at the dealer, and worse. The new microphone helped tremendously. But at first the interior lights and many other little things weren't working so I had to take three extra trips to the dealer to fix all the little problems they caused when fixing the microphone. After a couple of visits, they found a (24-pin?) connector wasn't inserted back correctly. But still other little things stopped working. Then they kept finding other little fixes like blown fuses and such. They finally got it fixed after way too many visits. It might have been easy if they knew exactly what they were doing. But I think this install was new to them.

Try the "SYNC My Phone" app to load from a USB drive programmed by your PC or Mac. See here: http://boards.synccommunity.com/n/pfx/forum.aspx?tsn=1&nav=messages&webtag=fordsyncmb&tid=1646

There's been so much confusion on this data usage issue that many of the Droid forums have a special sticky note at the top. Unlimited truly means unlimited. Grab all the data you can get for the $30/month. Verizon has NO cap on data usage for the Droid phone. Really! The 5 GB you describe is for other types of data plans (such as tethering your phone to a computer).

What's even more crazy, while looking through my SYNC music list of artists on my Nav screen recently, I noted the ABC key will list all of the ABCs (like you would expect), not just A or B or C. And this is within the same SYNC interface! Some engineers somewhere needs some schooling.