superswiss: I tried United States of America in the Contact file. It did not work either. . If I input an address file into "Favorites", the nav system accepts USA. However the Favorites files only accepts "Home" and "Work".

 

When you pull up the contact in COMAND, does the address look right? Are all the parts of the address correctly separated into their own field? Below is a picture of my dealership contact. This is how it should look like and if I select the address it correctly recognizes it for navigation (see second pic). This is one that previously didn't work until I edited the country to United States of America and now it works.

 

superswiss: Thx for pictures. The address shows correctly from the Contact file, but in the nav system display everything is on one line (not separated on three lines) and sometimes there is not enough room on one line to display the entire address. The reply from the nav system is "No result". When I changed USA to United States of America most of the rest of the address was not displayed on the single line. I have also tried shorter addresses where the entire address is displayed but not in the proper order. For example, the ZIP Code shows up before the state (FL). In all cases the nav system responds with "No Result".

The Home and Work addresses stored in "Favorites" display OK and the nav system finds those.

 

Ah yes, that's exactly what I suspected is going on in your case. I believe we had an exchange on this in another thread. This is exactly what I've seen with Android in the past. The Bluetooth stack on Android incorrectly crams the entire address into a single field when syncing it to a handsfree device. This is a problem of the phone. I don't know if this happens if OEMs replace the Android Bluetooth stack with their own, or what is causing this, but at least it seems it works correctly with Samsung phones. There are third-party Bluetooth apps that you can find in the Google Play Store which fix this and correctly sync the address with the individual fields. BMW may have implemented a workaround for this in their system and parse the address to break it back up into the individual fields as this is a known issue with Android. Sounds like older versions of COMAND may have also had this workaround, but I guess it was left out of NTG 5.5. But to be clear, this is a bug in Android. The Bluetooth profile calls for the address to be broken up into the individual parts.

 

superswiss: Thank you so much again. I have a Samsung Android 5 and my wife has a Samsung Android 10. Neither one works with the Comand nav system as we have discussed, but both work very well with 2019 & 2020 BMW nav systems. I'm not a smart phone expert and appreciate your advice. Can you tell me what kind of app in the Google Play Store I should be looking for?

 

Unfortunately, I don't know the apps. Last time I came across this issue was back when I had an Audi. There were several owners who had this exact same issue for the exact same reason with the Audi system. Maybe the poster with the Galaxy S9 can chime in if they are using a third-party Bluetooth app. It may also have to do with what app you are using to store/manage your contacts. I had a similar issue in the past with my iPhone when I still had my contacts stored in Google Contacts and synced them to my iPhone and then to the car via Bluetooth. The entire address also ended up in the address field instead of split over the individual fields. This issue actually goes beyond Android. Google in many of their systems stores the address as what's called a blob, basically a single text field. It's more flexible, because you can enter the address many different ways, but it requires a smart algorithm that recognizes all the different formats and can properly split the address into street, city, state, zip code, country, province, postal code and what not depending on the region.

 

superswiss: Thanks again. How do you make the nav system in your 2019 MB work? What kind of phone do you have?

 

I have an iPhone XS running the latest iOS 14.2 and my contacts are all stored and managed in the cloud in Exchange servers and then synced to all my devices. I'm generally not an Apple user, but when it comes to my phone I just want it to work w/o a ton of tinkering and the iPhones have simply worked best for me over the years. I am a software engineer by trade, and when I was younger I enjoyed tinkering and customizing the crap out of my devices, but these days I need my tools to just work. I don't have the patience anymore to deal with Bluetooth issues etc.

 

superswiss: So if I get an iPhone and transfer the contacts to that phone, will the nav system be able to use the addresses downloaded via bluetooth into the nav system Contact file?

 

Yes and no. So as mentioned above, when entering an address on the iPhone, the country will say United States, instead of United States of America and you can't change it. This is not an issue for me, because I manage my contacts through Outlook on my PC mostly, and Outlook sets the country to United States of America, so then when the addresses get synced to my iPhone and then to the car via Bluetooth it is properly recognized. I think there was a change in iOS 14, because I could swear previously I could just leave the country blank, but now it forces me to select one from a dropdown. So it's not all perfect, but I can workaround it for now by editing my contacts in Outlook. Maybe Mercedes will eventually release an update so it recognizes United States and United States of America.

 

superswiss: Thx again. I use Outlook also. How do you transfer the Outlook contacts to iPhone? Sorry for the dumb questions, but software is not my specialty.

 

Well, you don't transfer them directly from Outlook to the iPhone, although technically that is possible via iTunes, but would require periodic manual syncing. The way this is commonly done these days is by opening a cloud email account first. For example you can open a free account on http://outlook.com. Then add all your contacts to it. So now your contacts live in the cloud. Then you add the outlook.com account to Outlook so you can manage your account from there, or you can simply manage it from the browser directly on outlook.com. Then on the iPhone you also add the outlook.com account as an email account and it will automatically download all your contacts and keep them in sync. So now whenever you change, add or delete a contact via Outlook or directly on outlook.com, the change will automatically sync to the phone via outlook.com and then from the phone to the car via Bluetooth. That's the beauty of using the cloud. All the data is synced in real time. Whenever you buy a new phone, you don't have to worry about transferring the data. You just add your outlook.com account to the new phone and all your data will download. If you have other devices such as a tablet etc. you can add the account there as well and have access to all your contacts. Same for other apps on your computer besides Outlook. This gives you a single place where all your contacts and calendar appointments for that matter are stored and then they just get synced to all your devices and you can make changes on any of your devices and the changes will sync back to the cloud and all your other devices. Added bonus is if you ever lose or break your phone, you don't lose all your contacts and calendar appointments, because they are stored in the cloud and the phone only stores a copy. So you can easily replace your dead or stolen phone and your data gets downloaded to the new device.

 

I have a Samsung Galaxy S 9 running Android 10 and K-9 Mail. The phone syncs automatically when it connects to the car using Bluetooth. In addition the phone syncs with Office Outlook 2010 on my PC. Also text messages are read and responded to via voice while in the car.

 

superswiss: Thank you so very much for info. I'll get an iphone and follow your instructions. FYI, I have also contacted Daimler-Benz in Germany and asked if they'll have a fix for this, but so far no reply, and I don't really expect any, arrogant as they are. After 8 MBs maybe it is time to give up on them.

 

Just a similar story to tell about my 2020 E450 wagons navigation.

Tuesday I was on Texas 130, which is a toll road 80 miles long from end to end. Half of it is a posted 80 mph, the other half a posted 85 mph.

Once on it I set the navagation to go to Ft Worth, Texas, I had the nav on FAST mode of travel. Well it kept trying to get me to get off and go down to I-35 which goes thru Austin, Texas. You never want to drive thru Austin on I-35 if you can avoid it.

So i set the navigation to SHORT mode and set the same destination. Got the same result.....wanted me to go to I-35 and thru Austin.

Then I set the navigation to ECO mode. While setting it I told myself tying this is plain Stupid with a capital S. Nope, in ECO it had me stay on the Tx 130 doing 85 mph. all the way to the end near Georgetown, Tx. It's a 80 mile long turnpike/toll road. Should do it under an hour easily.

I thought this over and finally figured it out. While on Tx 130 the posted speed limit on the speedometer screen and nav screen said the posted limit was 55 mph. Therefore it should have gone to ECO being the lower speed limit vs I-35 which is in places 60......65......70 mph. Nobody drives interstates that slow.

The week before I was in Cotati, Rohnert Park, Petaluma CA. On the way back to Tx the Nav had me going down Ca 4 to get to I-5. Now how Stupid is that I ask you? Should have stayed on the 680 till you hit the 580 and go to Tracy to get on the I-5 as I usually do. The CA 4 sucks big ones imho.

 

I'm kinda confused by your route. If you are coming from Cotati, Rohnert Park, Petaluma heading to TX, you would head down 101, then 580 over the Richmond Bridge, down 80/580 and then continue on 580 to I-5. You wouldn't be near CA-4 or I-680, unless you are taking a detour on CA-37 for some reason. I often come down from that area, however I'm not heading to I-5, but to the SF Bay Area and the only time it took me over to I-680 via CA-37 and I-780 was to get around a major accident on I-80/I-580 in the Berkeley area (verified by Google Maps on my phone). I've actually once headed to Pleasanton, which is right where I-680 intersects with I-580 and even then it didn't route me over to I-680 and I always have my route preference set to Fast. Going to I-680 is at least a 1 hour detour from the Rohnert Park area, unless there's really bad traffic on 101, 80 or 580. Something strange going on with your system, or do you maybe have "Avoid toll roads" turned on? Even though the Richmond bridge is not a toll road going east (only going west), it might still avoid it unless you allow toll roads.