The phone itself has to be activated for the car.
If your phone is not on the BMW approved list it will still work but the car
display may not show you your entire list of contacts.
Either way you have to learn how to operate the car controls for incoming
and outgoing calls.
If you do understand how to do this any BMW dealer will do it for you. If
your car is bluetooth equipped they should have done this for you when you
got the car.
It generally takes at least 30 seconds.

I've had my 320 for 18 months now and use a Nokia 6230.  When I had
the Nokia reflashed to the latest firmware I had everything working
(contacts, phone numbers and texts), previously the address book was
not populated.

However, the beemer only records one phone number per person :(
whereas on the phone I may have 2 or 3.
--
John Perry

http://www.redoak.co.uk
http://www.eze-buy.co.uk