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BMW Canada announced today that all 2006 BMW models from September 2005 production equipped with BMW Assist (Bluetooth® technology) are now capable of full address book integration with the BlackBerry® 8700 Series™ from Research In Motion (RIM). The integration with BMW vehicles provides customers with the ability to pair their BlackBerry device with their BMW, download the address book and place calls through on-board vehicle controls or voice-activation. BMW is the first automaker to provide BlackBerry users the additional address book pairing capability and Canadian BMW owners become the first in the world to benefit from this functionality.

Customers can easily integrate their BlackBerry device with the BMW vehicle through a one-time Bluetooth pairing to establish the connection. The pairing takes only minutes, depending on address book size, after which, BlackBerry owners can enjoy several integration features including:

• Complete BlackBerry address book access from iDrive or the Multifunction Steering Wheel, depending on vehicle specifications.
• Call activation via manual address book scrolling and selection.
• Call activation using the iDrive controller, steering wheel buttons or by voice command.
• The ability to pair BlackBerry devices with multiple BMW vehicles.
• The ability to pair up to four BlackBerry devices with a single BMW vehicle (limited to using one device at a time).

“As an industry leader in technological innovations that not only enhance the driving experience, but also provide premium levels of safety, comfort and convenience, BMW is once again breaking new ground,” stated Lindsay Duffield, President and CEO, BMW Group Canada. “We are thrilled that our development of this integration in conjunction with RIM, a Canadian business success story, will provide Canadian BMW and BlackBerry owners with a world first.”

“BMW and BlackBerry are two high performance brands with customer bases that obviously overlap. We are very pleased to see BMW support BlackBerry handsets and further enhance usability through BMW’s on-board controls,” said Mike Lazaridis, President and Co-CEO at Research In Motion.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 20th, 2005 at 12:30 pm and is filed under BMW, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.