One issue I have with the 2005 Toyota Prius is that you can’t dial the phone when the car is in motion. Safety feature. Now, if I’m on the freeway, I don’t want to have to pull over to the shoulder (as if I’m going to get off at an exit) so I can dial a phone, and then fight my way back. I can dial the phone itself, but that kind of reduces the utility of hand-free. (Not to mention moving my eyes farther away from the road – and the phone I’m calling is ringing before the phone makes the Bluetooth connection.)
Not sure if it works in the '05 Prius, but in my '07 Prius, I can dial anything on my speed dial list which I can setup in the car. Like you, I cannot “free” dial a number while the car is moving, but I can pick one of my “saved” numbers.
I can dial by voice, that is, by reading out the digits. That works approximately one time out of fifty, and is slightly more dangerous than just setting the cruise control and hoping for a clear, straight road while I pull out my phone and dial it without Priotic assistance.
Unfortunately, my phone does not have the capability to send its phone book to the Prius. I tried looking for a phone book on the Prius that I could enter numbers into manually, but couldn’t find one.
It depends. Traffic does not always travel at 70 mph. Punching soft buttons on the in-dash MFD at 5 mph is not particularly dangerous – except it won’t let you; hence, the desire for a hack. Or you could just stop the car when everyone else is moving around you at 5 mph and piss them off while you punch some numbers. That’s probably a bit dangerous. If you’re doing 70 mph, then you don’t have a bunch of cars around you. It’s more dangerous to pull over to the shoulder, stop, and then accelerate to match speed with the people who are on the freeway and try to merge with them.
Or you can physically reach down into your backpack, dig out the phone, look down at the tiny keypad, and punch the numbers. That seems less safe than using the MFD that is situated such that you can see through the windshield, and is far enough away to reduce the focus change. And it defeats the whole purpose of hands-free use.
I am not aware of any feature to transfer the phone book from my phone to the Prius. On my '07 Prius, I had to manually enter my speed dial numbers. I’ll have to look next time I’m in the car to see where it was done from.