The automotive industry's complaint is not about Bluetooth radio, but it's about Bluetooth implementations.

Several car manufacturers made it known during the conference that they are frustrated with the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG)'s inability to decide on a standardized phone book transfer method between a car kit and a mobile handset via Bluetooth. The Bluetooth community, although fully aware of the automotive industry's need, has been bickering over a data synchronization method over the last three years.

Making a hands-free calls in a car by accessing a phone book or SIM card in a handset via Bluetooth is "one of the major features" for consumers, said Peter Schramm, leader of communications systems at BMW. And yet, the phonebook access functionality is still not supported in the current version of Bluetooth Hands-Free Profile.

The phonebook access problem is, however, just the tip of the iceberg. There are many implementation issues the Bluetooth community still needs to sort out, in order to provide application-level interoperability between Bluetooth devices, when they are used in different environments or under different usage scenarios.

Talks on which profiles should be used to enable a certain feature are "a never-ending issue" for Bluetooth, acknowledged Andrew Edlund, marketing director for global markets at Bluetooth SIG, Inc. "It's because the technology continues to evolve."

Jean-Christophe Bar, communications project leader at Renault, said not every Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone supports the same set of Bluetooth profiles, which, in turn, makes it harder for automotive manufacturers to offer universal support for all Bluetooth handsets in their car kit. Newer phones may support both the headset and hands-free profiles, but others include only one of them. "Consumers may see a Bluetooth label, but they don't understand the concept of 'profiles,'" said BMW's Schramm.

The Bluetooth SIG has been working on the phone book access issue for some time, and it's viewed as a badly needed feature by the automotive industry, acknowledged Michael Foley, executive/technical director of Bluetooth SIG Inc.

Whether it becomes a part of the hands-free profile or yet-to-be determined phonebook access profile remains unclear, he said. At issue is not to which rofile the new phonebook access feature should belong, Foley said, but "developing a high-quality solution." The, he said, requires agreement on a single method out of "so many different proprietary technologies that exist today" for mobile computing and communication devices.