The Treo 650 and the Lexus GS300

Due to my boredom of being at home until my new apartment can be moved into on 1 September, I spent yesterday tagging along with my mother and sister to Royal Oak. My sister, three years younger than myself, had to go through the motions for senior pictures. I decided that my mother and I would go shopping and get some food for the couple of hours she was in the photo studio.

There was a lot more waiting involved than I had originally anticipated, and since I felt slightly out of place in the studio amongst a set of fashion models, I went back out to the street, got an iced tea at the Pronto! corner store, and sat back in my mother’s Lexus GS300.

The car is a genuine cornucopia of tech toys: GPS and DVD-based navigation, “positionable” audio, on-screen maintenance and trip statistics, and – my personal favorite – Bluetooth hands-free. My mother has a Verizon Treo 600, so she can’t use this feature; my Treo 650, however, has Bluetooth, so I attempted to pair it with the vehicle’s hands-free system out of a lack of much of anything better to do.

It took me a while to find where the Bluetooth functions were on the car; you have to press the “Info” button, then “Telephone”, then “Settings” to get to the screen where you can add a new Bluetooth phone. I changed the GS300’s Bluetooth passkey to a better 4-digit number from the default 1212 for security purposes (supposedly, you can be Bluetooth spammed) and then attempted to pair my Treo with the car. The car waited, asking for me to connect the phone, showing the passkey, with only a “Cancel�? button.

I turned the Treo’s Bluetooth radio on and tapped “Setup Devices”. After choosing “Hands-Free kit”, the Treo recognised the GS300 and said it had paired properly with it, but the GS300 never recognised the Treo. This is most definitely an issue, and I had hoped it wasn’t on the Lexus’s side.

After a bit of impromptu research via Blazer on the Treo 650, it seems that the factory Bluetooth drivers don’t maintain a constant connection with the GS300, therefore the GS300 can’t connect properly with the Treo. I needed to find a way to pair the phone with the GS300 for more than just a second so the Lexus would realise that the Treo is there.

Palm released a Car Kit Update for factory cars, but Lexus isn’t listed as a supported manufacturer. For that matter, luxury brands Audi, Mercedes-Benz, and BMW are also unsupported, making me wonder what Palm was thinking when they released a smartphone that doesn’t support most of the upper segment of the automotive market. I felt rather disappointed, but with the idle time, I decided to think this through.

For all intents and purposes, the Treo 650 thinks it has paired with the Lexus, but it’s the car that can’t detect the Treo due to the Treo’s on-again/off-again Bluetooth radio. I had to find a way to force the radio to connect to the Lexus for an extended state to pair, and I came up with a rather easy way: place a phone call and route it to the Lexus. By doing so, I’m sure to transfer some sort of data with the Lexus. It’s a hack, sure, but it just might work, I thought.

I called my disconnected apartment number from the Treo 650 while the Lexus was still on its pair screen. The phone and car did much of nothing, and about two seconds into the Treo’s phone call, the Lexus displayed a “Bluetooth connection successful” message before routing the call through the car’s speaker.

Thankfully, it didn’t work for just that one phone call; it worked for any phone call afterward, and now the Lexus searches for my Treo whenever someone gets in the car (you’ll see the car timeout with “Bluetooth connection failed” roughly three minutes after the car starts if my Treo isn’t present.) The Treo may be unsupported by palmOne, but thanks to a small hack, you can get it to work with your GS300 (or GS430, if you’ve got a performance edge) with no problems.

A Summary How-To: Pair a Treo 650 with a 2005-2007 Lexus GS300/GS430
According to comments below, this should work for the 2007 Lexus IS250 and 2007 Camry as well.

On the Lexus navigation system

• Push the Info button on the left button panel by the navigation screen.
• Tap Telephone on the display.
• Tap Settings on the display.
• Scroll down the settings page by tapping the down arrow button on the display.
• Tap the Add phone button. The Lexus will await your Treo’s pairing and become discoverable.

On the Treo 650

• On the main Applications launcher, tap Bluetooth.
• Turn Bluetooth On.
• Tap Setup Devices.
• Tap Hands-free Setup.
• Tap Next. The Treo will look for a device within range.
• Choose HANDS FREE, since this is what your Bluetooth system will be named by default.
• Tap OK. The Treo will automatically connect to the Lexus.
• Tap the Phone button and initiate a phone call to another phone from the Treo, now that the radio is on. The Lexus will recognise the call and pair the phone with your Lexus.

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