Ben Forta

It had to happen, I just ran into the first real glitch in my car’s Bluetooth feature – no support for +. All dialing is via voice recognition, you say “dial” to dial, “pair” to pair a phone, “phonebook” to access the phonebook, “one” for 1, and so on. Managing phones and phonebook entries works this way too, in fact there is no way to interact with the system other than via voice recognition. Obviously, all digits are recognized. Non-numeric characters are recognized too, but just “star” for *, and “pound” for #. So why do I need to use +? I have a GSM phone and + is used by GSM to specify a country code, +44 for England, +1 for USA, +61 for Australia, and so on. I just needed to call a Macromedia UK employee and couldn’t, “plus” is not recognized! This is a significant oversight, especially considering that most of the Bluetooth enabled phones available in the US are GSM phones. This does not preclude International dialing, but it takes make doing so a pain (there is a workaround, dial on the phone and transfer the call, but that’s not ideal). I just discussed this with engineers at Acura who at first did not believe me that I actually needed the +, and finally agreed to “look into this one”. Oh well, that’s the price you pay for playing with the cutting edge.