Just bought a new to me smax, which although having only a fairly basic stereo was apparently Bluetooth enabled, so I assumed I could stream my music from my phone through the car in the same way as it can control my phone for voice calls. But it doesn’t, at least not found so far.

Doing some googling has only left me more confused, so to the hive mind. Anyone had and solved this one? Is plugging in an audio lead on the aux really the only option, or is there a ‘software’ upgrade available to fix it

No it doesn’t stream music only voice calls. I was equally underwhelmed when we got ours

Same here. Voice calls work great, but it won’t take either music or satnav instructions from the phone. Annoying as if I’m using the satnav app on Android, I really need to turn bluetooth off on the phone or it sends voice instructions via bluetooth instead of phone speaker.

Same on my 09 mondeo – And it’s not great at connecting – sometimes just drops off which means having to stop the car to get it to connect properly. That is my one annoyance about the car 🙁

Mine randomly tries to ditch me and pair up with any taxi it’s in proximity to.

Tart.

Bluetooth phone thingy on mine works great. No audio though, but it has an aux input and I got one of these:

as recommended by STW, so sound is great.

(’07 model)

I’ve got an S-Max and it definitely does stream music over Bluetooth. You pair the phone with the stereo and then one of the input options on the headunit is for Bluetooth audio. We’ve got a titanium model with the Sony headunit so maybe different specs do different things?

It’s ok for playing music like that but a bit annoying as there is no control, so you have to do all the selecting and playing options with the phone.

What year is it?

I’m assuming it’s a similar unit to the Mondeo; the earlier mkIV models didn’t have A2DP (bluetooth streaming), it was a feature quietly added in later models. Possibly somehere around 09? They added USB at the same time, so I’d hazard that if you have a USB port you’ll have AD2P, if you’ve just got a 3.5mm audio jack then you won’t.

The other thing is, the stock firmware is rubbish. I had all manner of ephemeral problems with mine until I got the latest firmware – I requested it during a service – and they all went away. Weird things like you the display suddenly forgetting it had half of the features, or half the controls stopping working, or sometimes it just refused to pair for no good reason.

This is for the Sony unit in the Titanium anyway; the other units might be different?

Two of my friends have identical new Focus’ss and one of then had the issue described but not the other.

As above a firmware update seemed to sort it..

Interesting point about the firmware update – mine frequently gives up at things like displaying paired phone contacts etc. bloody annoying! May investigate that as a fix.