Will be continuing to search the forums,

but have done some research and according to the 2010 and 2011 C-Class brochures (U.S.), the Universal Media Interface was included with the MM package, whereas in 2008 and 2009, the UMI was not even available and the only solution was the individual option for the useless iPod Integration Kit, available with or without COMAND.

so the goal here is to retrofit the UMI on 2008-09 C-Classes. It can definitely be done, because the 2010-11 cars use the EXACT same COMAND equipment as the 2008-09 cars.


Any gurus know the answer?


These guys did back in 2008 before it was even available on the W204 directly from Mercedes, and have emailed them:





The dream is to update my 2008 COMAND at the dealer to the newest software available, and then install the UMI plug and play... however there is a chance it would require hackers...


This is the module:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/2008-2011-ME...dYHN~S&vxp=mtr


They claim it is for 2008 to 2011...

I think even when you get this working, its not going to work right.

the 2012 i have has MM package, MMI, ipod integration and so on. when you plug in even a date matched ipod into the vehicle, you can play music, but the interface is totally jumbled and in gibberish. it's effectively reading the raw ipod file structure, so the names of your music are the file names as coded by itunes on the device. you cant locate playlists or specific songs because they just come up as a mess of letters and numbers.

my belief is the ipod OS has changed so much that even the old ones cant be used with ease.

a good test would be to take a 2008-2009 freshly set up click wheel ipod, and plug it into a car that has the UMI and MMI and you will see what im talking about.

I have given up on trying to get the standard equipment to behave the way you could reasonably expect a modern car stereo to behave.

About 6 years ago, I bought a cheap (~£100) head unit for my WRX STi. It had bluetooth connectivity and as long as I was happy to control everything from the phone rather than the stereo (which I was), everything worked perfectly.

A couple of weeks ago I bought a cheap 30-pin to bluetooth dongle on eBay for £12. Again, I cannot control the music player from the car (except volume) but I can still stream music and control everything from my Pixel. It's not a perfect solution but it was very cheap and having read most of the threads on this forum on the subject, it's not really any worse than anything MB seems to be able to make available for our car.

It's all a bit crap but we are stuck with it.

some of the bluetooth dongles will give you info on the comand screen as well as functioning steering wheel controls, bovee tunes2air does for me, but those are a little more than 12 euro, prob around 100 + -

That's true except it only works with iPhones and I have a Google Pixel.