Mercedes-Benz Media Interface Plus review [Video]

By on Dec 20, 2010 at 4:20 PM
General December 20, 2010

If you are a Mercedes owner and a BGR reader, you might have noticed that your car falls a bit short in the technology department regarding music and video playback (any model Mercedes). The Media Interface Plus accessory is a just-released plug and play Bluetooth box that’s now available for purchase, and since it offers a whole heap of enhancements, we decided it was worth checking out for ourselves. For starters, here is what the Media Interface Plus can do that your Mercedes currently can’t: control the Pandora app from your iPhone (including changing songs and even rating songs thumbs down or thumbs up from the steering wheel), streaming music from your Bluetooth device (iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, iPod touch, etc.), allowing you to view your SMS messages from the car’s COMAND display, and even playing back iPod video from your iPhone or iPod. Hit the jump to find out what else this little accessory can do, and check out our video overview.

The box itself is pretty clunky and much bigger than we had imagined, but physically connecting it is dead simple — just unplug your current iPod/media interface cable if you have one, and plug this in instead. You then have to first pair the new box via Bluetooth to your car, then you can pair your devices to it. A total of five phones/devices can be paired with only one active at a time. One of the first issues with the Media Interface Plus is: if you normally connect your phone via Bluetooth to your car your device can only be connected to either the car (for using the telephone) or the Media Interface Plus (for music).

While the expanded options the MIP offers is great, the device requires you to keep your phone or iPod physically connected in order to use most of the features properly. To control Pandora for instance, you’ll have to manually launch the app on your iPhone and start playing a station while the phone is connected. Then you can control it from the steering wheel and/or COMAND console. Video playback requires the device to be physically connected as well, streaming Bluetooth music doesn’t obviously, and SMS viewing does not as well. We couldn’t get SMS viewing to work on our iPhone, and streaming Bluetooth playback sometimes takes a while to start and get going properly. We also couldn’t make a downloaded TV episode play from our iPhone though the audio played back just fine.

All in all, the Mercedes Media Interface Plus enhances the existing offering, while adding the capability of streaming your music wirelessly via Bluetooth. If we wen’t into this with that mindset, we’d have been a little happier, we just assumed you could do most of what the device promised without physically connecting your phone, that’s all. At $298 for the accessory, it’s a bit expensive for just enabling Pandora playback/control, streaming Bluetooth, and iPod video playback — but hey, we won’t judge you if you take the plunge.

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  • Jerrygee

    So is this a sponsored ad?

    • monkey

      you’re an idiot

    • George

      I wish they would just admit that it is an ad instead of trying to fool us and insult us at the same time.

      • http://www.bgr.com Jonathan Geller

        Not only is it not, but I spent a nice chunk of my Saturday driving to buy the accessory, hooking it up, and messing around with it…

        So, we actually paid to review this. So sad, right?

      • George

        So because you own a Mercedes, that’s the only car tech you report on?

      • http://twitter.com/ROMSPAX Roman

        So you literally bought $300 Bluetooth adapter just to be able to ”wirelessly” play music off your iphone/pandora..? I’m sorry but that guy is sorta of right.. your an idiot if you DIDN”T get sponsored.

  • http://www.lonseidman.com lonseidman

    Just want to make sure I understand this: This adapter will not stream music if the phone portion of my device is connected via Bluetooth to the vehicle? What kind of boneheaded limitation is that?

    The iPod interface is already clunky enough in that it completely hijacks my iPhone whenever it’s plugged in. I actually took my glove box apart and went back to the analog input so I could at least use the iPhone’s interface to play non-ipod audio.

    Mercedes et. al. should just give up trying to design interfaces and let Apple or Google do it.

    • http://www.bgr.com Jonathan Geller

      Correct — only one connection can be active at a time, so if your iPhone is connected to the car’s telephone portion, it will not work on the Media Interface portion. A workaround is to have the phone connected via Bluetooth to the car, and physically plug the phone into the MIP — that way you can use everything as well as phone calling. I didn’t figure that out until a couple frustrating trial periods.

  • http://www.facebook.com/peterf Peter Fares

    Why do so many luxury cars have such horrible tech features? If my $200 Sony head unit can do all this (except video as it doesn’t have a large color screen) and more, why do companies like Mercedes struggle so much?

  • Norm

    Mercedes Benz really should have gone open source with the DROID OS. They are just limiting the potential here. Most people own DROIDs, not blackberrys or iphones, especially people with money.

    • Anonymous

      I’m not exactly sure if you’re being sarcastic, but I would definitely say that blackberry definitely owns the high income demographic. With apple being second among younger wealthy people, and even then, they have an iphone personally but a blackberry for work. I work in fundraising and I can’t think of any donor I know that has an android.

    • BrokeThoughts

      watch your copyright

  • Blogreader

    Thanks for the post. This product looks half baked — he couldn’t get it to immediately play the song that was on his iPhone. Yeah that’s great when going down the highway trying to fiddle with it.

    Also doesn’t show the song? Who let this product out of QA? That’s one of the benefits of having a box in between.

    I’ll stick with just plugging it into the headset jack.

  • Dannyloc

    LOL That thing is horrible. Get an AUDI n you won’t need any additional boxes!

  • http://twitter.com/fyrfyter33 fyrfyter33

    I want to know why they repeatedly insist on showing this stupid crap, over and over again. This is almost as bad as the cursing review of the GPS unit, when he couldn’t find a place to put it in his Aston Martin. Jesus, give it a rest already. Nobody on here gives a crap about a car only a very small percentage of the US population can afford. Who cares. Yes, cheaper cars are apparently better at integrating technology, which is why you should avoid expensive overpriced cars. This is definitely a downer for this site, just as the last one was. Because the people that run this site give a crap about pricey cars, it is like they expect the rest of us too as well. We don’t!

    • Anonymous

      the problem with BGR is that the guy who runs the site was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Now he feels the need to massage his ego by putting up crap like this. He knows very well that no one cares about posts like this one. They change their writers like socks, have no consistency, and seem to forget what the site is all about. Judging by the number of comments the posts have been getting over the past months, it appears ppl are leaving this joint for greener pastures (ie: Engadget).

    • http://www.bgr.com Jonathan Geller

      The OQO GPS accessory review was bad? It was bad because the accessory was bad. This review of the MIP for Mercedes applies to all Mercedes in the last 2 years, all models. Not sure how this is out of place for a mobile / gadget site. It’s pretty cool that you can stream Bluetooth music, control Pandora (and even thumbs up and thumbs down) from the steering wheel, playback video from your device, and even read SMS messages.

      New Audi’s have this already, Mercedes is playing catch-up. Again, how is this not relevant?

      • http://twitter.com/fyrfyter33 fyrfyter33

        If that were really true, then you would spend a lot more time reviewing the tech inside cars, since it seems to change about every other week. But you don’t, you only review tech in high end cars, since that is what you own. Nobody cares. If tech in cars were really important to this site, you would do a broad review of all the capabilities of different cars, low to high end, but you don’t. You also never talk about aftermarket stereos that seem to be growing into computers by the minute. Shouldn’t that be included as tech & gadgets too? I’ve never seen a review on here off of any of that stuff. I don’t care about what a Mercedes has, and judging by the comments, neither do most everyone else. Most of the readers on this site, probably don’t have a Mercedes, I sure as hell don’t. Thank god for that. I have yet to see a Mercedes that’s as useful/versatile as my Toyota Tacoma is. If you did a broad review of everything, and not just high end stuff, you wouldn’t get comments like this from me, where as this article just seems like flaunting of expensive stuff. Most of the other articles on here, are more down to earth, things that everyone could buy-get-use. I guess this article just wasn’t gear for us “commoners.”

      • crowdofmax

        fyrfyter33, thanks for sharing with us readers that for you personally this review is not useful, my suggestion to you is – if something does not interest you, skip it.

        I wouldn’t go on mercedes’ website to see what they have to offer, but this 2 minute (I ff through the video) review was interesting for me because I saw a clunky interface I wouldn’t want to pay for and a very specific solution (pandora on i-device) – which I don’t care for either. Makes me understand the target market (my wife’s 2006 lexus 400h has a tape player built-in… we’re 30, not 50!) for these cars. You do bring up a good point regarding the car market and audio options, cheaper cars (Ford Focus?) have had a great offering in their baseline for years now, but for a Lexus (I drive an is250 2006) Bluetooth is NOT stock – ridiculous… but I guess people who pay for a new Lexus can fork over another $$$ for each ‘additional’ feature).

        I find your other comments, regarding perceived inconsistency of reporting on this blog – tiresome and misplaced. This isn’t a blog dedicated to Automotive. This blog covers a lot of different technologies and goes into some depth for most of them. If you really want a “well rounded review of all auto-audio solutions out there” you need to look elsewhere. If you are looking for some cool / interesting gadget reviews (you would never have known about this gadget and how backwards it is – in my opinion :) ) J.G. didn’t go into it, for whatever reason… and no i’m not affiliated with any blog or anything like that – just bored at work during down time…

  • Anonymous

    Will this work with my new CL550 4MATIC?

  • http://www.youtube.com/jeromeo1980 Jeromeo

    I’m sorry, but what the hell kinda adapter is that? It’s not USB, it’s not MicroUSB, it’s not iApple proprietary 30pin connector–what is it?!

  • travelguy

    I bought this a few months ago and, for the most part, can’t get it to work and it’s not for a lack of trying. Somehow, after a lot of fiddling around, I can get the phone to connect BOTH to the regular phone bluetooth connection (to make calls) and to the Media Plus box to stream media (I think the process was pair to car, pair to media interface, then pair to the car again and, somehow, it remembers them both. It was the pair to the car again that got my iphone to pair to the car and media interface simultaneously. That said, then all i could do was listen to my music wirelessly. I have to start it on the iphone though, once started, you can move forward and back tracks from the command module but not much else. The command screen doesn’t give any track info (like it does if you’re connected via the cable) and, like the review, I couldn’t get any of the other features to work.

    This is still a “work in progress” and IMHO, not worth the $. More frustration than pleasure

  • Jase

    Is that Aston Martin I see?

  • Anonymous

    Blog must be doing pretty good to be rocking an S Class (or CL, can’t tell). BTW, it is COMAND, not COMMAND.

    Certainly works more thoroughly than the iPod interface cable that came with my 2008 BMW X5. That cable, which they charged about $200 for, just allowed the iPod to interface with the iDrive. However, it ran the audio over the accessory outlet cable, and not through the actual USB interface, meaning that the sound quality was lacking, and sometimes finicky. You are much better hooking up a USB stick to it with playlists synced manually or through MediaMonkey to get music on your older iDrive equipped BMW. Mercedes and BMW never were on the forefront of in car electronics systems. The COMAND system, while improved over their lackluster previous offerings, is still far behind the Japanese competition.

  • Jteply13

    Why would I care about this device when MB has a PCMCIA slot which can play MP3 off an SD card? I can buy a 4 gig card (max size card allowed) and put my music in playlists and I’m done. No tinkering with anything, just enjoy my music. I have multiple 4 gig SD cards with different genres of music. So no limitation…. WOW what an idea!!! Forget this garbage and go the easier route!!

  • CBXweb

    Looks like it further complicates things. I’d rather use a USB thumb drive or a SD card, and read my text messages illegally. But being able to use Pandora is cool. Then again, I drive a Honda Fit, so my point doesn’t matter.

  • AirPlay Believer

    What a “bag of hurt” Mercedes! You did it once, team up with Apple again, this time bring AirPlay to your vehicles.

  • Brdl

    dude, a $100,000 S class? Seriously?

  • JC

    Seriously MB has to step up to the game. This “interface” is junk! Massage it?!?!?! My Audi never has to be massaged! Plug it in to the MMI and it displays on the screen as well as my dash screen. Another MB FAIL!

    • JC

      Sorry, forgot to mention that it actually plays whatever you select to play….the very first time. Beautiful cars that MB has, horrible electronics!!!!

  • slk55amgkid

    Someone’s ballin… with an Aston Martin and an S550-4M

  • BrokeThoughts

    You need this ADDITIONAL accessory for a Benz? I can do this in my Fusion Hybrid with no alterations …

  • Robbo68

    that thing blows. I bought it for my GL320 and took it back the next day. It doesn’t download enough contacts to be worth it, and it increases the Bluetooth delay for phone use. All in all, for 300 bucks, the thing is a complete ripoff.

  • GL450

    LOL!!! All ur comments are funny!! I feel like an idiot for actually considering spending so much money on a peice of shit plastic converter, because I know next I would buy the membership to pandora, because you only can skip about five songs in an hour for free. Love the sarcasm! nothing like a wise ass to make you feel like a total bone-head!! I will have a V8 instead!! Thanks guys.

  • Anonymous

    The MIP — that way you can use everything as well as phone calling. I didn’t figure that out until a couple frustrating trial periods.

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