Well I got a brush-off response from Sony support pointing me to some obscure "white paper" buried deeply in their site ( http://www-support-downloads.sonymobile.com/f3111/whitepaper_EN_F3111_F3113_F3115_2.pdf ).
As a normal everyday consumer, I bought a phone that supposedly had "bluetooth" and my car has "bluetooth" that has worked will all other phones I have used in it. One could reasonably expect the new phone to work too....afterall the car is only 2 years old and hardly considered obsolete. Who would reasonably expect someone to go mining through a manufacturer's site for technical details that are unannounced as being changed from previous implementations of bluetooth???
Anyway how would I even know what implementation my car has (through a Sony radio and Microsoft Sync system). I could read the Sony "whitepaper" all day and it does NOT flag any potential issues.
To me it seems like they either did not properly test changes to bluetooth or they intentionally made change without publishing
the changes which could cause potential incompatibilities. In either case it reflects poorly on their respect for their customers.
It also seems strange that Sony is restricting its potential market for the A6 phones through introducing incompatibilities with the vast majority of existing bluetooth devices including the majority of bluetooth enabled cars...that is a huge market. Sure some are OK but many are not and, like with the Ford Emergency Assist, you won't know until real safety is threatened through incompatibilities which may not be evident until a serious accident situation is experienced and the phone connection becomes critical.
So, as far as I can see, don't hold your breaths waiting for a solution to Bluetooth issues. Mine is a minor issue and I have sympathies for those with more critical bluetooth issues. But unless we express our concerns, we will not get the consumer support we need.
