Motorola phone question
 

I hardly use a phone when in the car, so the factory motorola phone with handset seems fine for my needs.

The car came with a Vodafone SIM in the slot, its a PAYG card. The card belonged to the previous owner and currently has £3.50 of credit on it, which I found out after registering with Vodafone online. In the long term, I'd like to not keep that number since friends of the previous owner may know it.

With the previous paragraph in mind, I tried my old T-Mobile SIM card, and a new O2 SIM card. Both of these report "SIM card not functional", so I ordered a new vodafone payg SIM card online assuming perhaps incorrectly the kit was locked to Vodafone. New card turned up, and I activated it in a standard phone so I know it works. However when placed in the car it also reports "SIM card not functional".

The other vodafone SIM works, and I could add credit to it. Only thing concerning me is the number is known to others, and the registered address is the previous keeper of the car.

Does the car need to have anything done to register SIM cards or should they just work....

I've tried EE, Giff Gaff O2, Lyca and TalkMobile SIMS and they all worked fine.
The only thing I can think of is to update the firmware to 5570.

I think your right, update of MMI is on my list. I have downloaded the update discs, and will go through the process once I am happy.

Mine was the same, only worked with some ancient SIM cards, but I swapped it to a bluetooth unit fairly quickly, so never got round to testing it with 5570.

I wish I could find an ancient SIM card... Tried using a PAYG one and it won't get recognised. Been quoted £400 to upgrade to full Bluetooth...

Weird, mine is a early 2006MY and works with any, even new microSIMS if I carefully postition them before sliding the sim tray shut.

The best SIM I had was with talkmobile, it was £1 a month rolling contract with 25 free mins, I must have been drunk when I cancelled that as it was ideal to receive calls and make the odd one to say "I'm here" or "I'll be late".

It's a shame there isn't something that one can for example pair any bluetooth phone to something that sits in the motorola cradle, using it as a sort of normal bluetooth to Audi bluetooth proxy.

On my A7 it had a rather natty SIM card tray in the dash which then turned the car into your mobile phone and used the data connection to run google earth mapping which was awesome. I then combined this with a special orange business tariff where you run 2 SIM cards on the same number and one is the primary sim and one the secondary sim. You then used the primary sim in your main iPhone and every time you got into the car just turn off the mobile and the car became the mobile on the same number using the secondary sim. Wish they could do this on all cars!! +++

I can now confirm that upgrading the MMI to version 1100 fixes this problem. All SIM cards are now being recognised as of that firmware. I have since migrated past that to 5150 and the cards are all still good.

After upgrading to 1100 I had to re-pair the motorola handset but that was dead easy.

Glad to hear it went well...