iPhone 3G works with Nokia 616 car kit

Steve Morgan — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 16:33:00 GMT

Well, that came as something of a surprise!

I finally got round to pensioning off my Nokia N70 last week and replacing it with an iPhone 3G. Now, I'm no disciple of all things Apple, but the iPhone appealed to me for a number of basic reasons; it does lots of things that I like, it does them mostly quite well and it looks nice.

There were two potential deal-breakers for me, though. The first was that I didn't want an iPhone unless it supported 3G; of course, Apple addressed that with the launch of the iPhone 3G. The second, I was much more sceptical about. It had to work with the Nokia 616 handsfree kit in my car. Now, it was reasonable for me to be sceptical. Firstly, the Nokia 616 doesn't seem to play very well with many of Nokia's own phones! It was only a couple of weeks ago that I managed to get the contacts from my N70 downloaded onto the 616. People who had tried the original iPhone with the 616 had had no success at all, from what I could find. Given that there was still plenty of (perfectly justified) moaning about the Bluetooth implementation on the iPhone 3G, I had no reason to believe that would be any different.

The only practical way for me to find out was to take the car to my local O2 shop and get one of the sales staff to try it. So I did. It took a while but eventually we managed to pair the phone and the car kit. However, it wouldn't download the contacts. Given that the iPhone doesn't support voice dialling, it meant that there was no way you could legally make a call while on the move, but receiving them was no problem at all. That was near enough for me, so I signed the paperwork and walked out with an 8GB model.

After some more faffing about later on, I was shocked to find that when I paired my own phone to the 616, it downloaded the contacts quite successfully.

It would be nice if voice dialling was supported, but other than that, it's working great.

So, I've had a week of fun with my new toy and I'm very, very impressed. I can't wait to see what Apple do with the next version!

EDIT: I upgraded to the 3GS in July 2009 and I'm pleased to report that it also works just fine.

EDIT: So far, not so much luck with the iPhone 4. See the comment, below, from June 27th 2010 for more details.

Steve Morgan - Technology Spot : phone, iPhone

iPhone 3G works with Nokia 616 car kit