How to pair a Bluetooth mobile phone with Ford's onboard Bluetooth handsfree

May 09, 2007

Waldek asks in the comments of one of my most popular posts:

So I’m from Poland, new owner CMax (second hands) with out Polish or English instruction book.
Could somebody help me? I can’t connect my mobile phone with navi system via Bluetooth. :(
By the way! I apologize everyone who have to use Polish roads and because of my poor English.

Let’s start from the end. Your English is fine :)

But… I’m assuming that you have the same navi unit that I have that’s depicted on the photos in the previous post, with large display and all. I do have the manual for Bluetooth, but I’m too lazy to go and fetch it from my car downstairs. So from memory I think it went something like this.

1. set your phone to “discoverable” mode
2. go to the “phone”, “menu” of the unit
3. look for the thing that says “add new phone”
4. it should now show the name of your phone. “Click” on it and it tries to pair
5. your phone should now show a pairing request from a “headset” that’s actually your car. :) And it asks for the passcode. It was standard, either 0000 or 1234.

There you go. I apologize if this is correct, I haven’t actually tried this recently. In any case, it was fairly logical interface and I could figure it out without a manual. Maybe it was also so that you initiated the pairing from the phone, not car?

The good news is that after you manage to do the pairing, it works well and like magic. The audio quality of both microphone and speakers is very good, and it of course integrates with the rest of your audio so it tones down the radio if there’s a call etc. And you don’t have to do anything, you just keep Bluetooth turned on for the phone all the time, and when you sit in car and turn it on, it automatically connects, and when you walk away, it disconnects. Magic. I like this kind of magic.

The only complaint I have for this thing is that if you get an incoming call, then on the display in the console it shows the caller number, but not the name that I have in my phonebook. It should show name too, because I can’t memorize all the numbers.

And some Polish roads are indeed rubbish, I had some strange experiences on them this weekend (another post coming sometime), but then again, some brand new ones like the new portions of A2 kick some serious ass and are very nice. And I understand that due to the upcoming European soccer championships in Poland+Ukraine in 2012 there are some major reconstructions going on there so we may expect to see some more high-quality transit road sections in Poland in the few next years.