At the dealer where I bought my ES350, all the cars had two warning stickers on the window: One said "Caution, tires will last substantially less than 20K miles", and the other said "Warning, parts, repairs, and maintenance on this car will cost substantially more than that for a comparable non-luxury brand car and may result in severe financial injury or debt".

 

Old thread, but I just updated my Nav with a DVD off ebay for $23 shipped. Piece of cake. Although, I want to get a whole new unit. I can't stand the fact it doesn't load the phone book or stream audio.

 

how do i do an update on aftermarket DVD when update button is not pulling in files from SD card

 

Not sure what year your lexus is; but my 2007 ES350 with factory NAV, has no problem at all loading the phone book off of my phone. Maybe your phone isn't compatible with that bluetooth. There's many versions of bluetooth and it isn't just a matter of: "I can make a phone call so it must be compatible". Different versions allow different features.

Not sure what you mean by "Steam Audio"? Do you mean via Bluetooth? I have no need for that because I simply plug my audio device into the aux jack. But again, as for the phone book, I have a motorola droid razr maxx HD and I had no problem at all uploading 600+ contacts into my lexus audio/nav system.

 

I have a 2009 es350. The Iphone5 is not compatible with a multi-transfer per the Lexus multi-link tool. Audio streaming lets you access the phones music without using the aux wire and control it using the steering controls. You can also use Pandora and other audio apps. Other things that are a disappointment would be the lack of dvd/.avi/.mp4 player , usb, SD card port as well as updatable software. Plus it has a cassette player. Nothing made past the early 90's should have a cassette player.

 

I hear you on the phone book. I think your best bet if you have another phone handy (old one maybe) is to transfer your contacts to that phone and then to the car. A pain for sure but better than transferring one by one. If you need, a google search will let you know how to save your contacts to gmail etc. and then they should load on another phone. BTW it seems to me to be more of an issue with iPhone then Lexus, I don't think we have an option to transfer the whole phone book at once.

 

socalxr...link to the ebay acct you purchased from?