If your car already has the Audi phone cradle, would you buy the V60?
 

I just took delivery of my A6 4.2 and it came with the phone cradle already build in the armrest, suitable for the V60 Motorola phone.
Because of the options the car came with I pretty much had no choice, accept this car with the cradle, or wait 2 or 3 months.
The problem is I alreay have a celphone with T Mobile (GSM, because I travel overseas on a regular basis)and the factory AUDI V60 phone is not a GSM phone. The V60 can be bought from AT&T with GSM but it would not work on the AUDI system. Furthermore, in any store you can buy a V60 phone for USD 110/120 whereas the AUDI phone costs +/- USD 400.00 . I suppose I could buy a second phone (AUDI V60) and let my friends deal with the problem of trying to find me by calling 2 phone numbers all the time (not good). On the other hand I could rip the dang phone craddle out , find a plug to close the hole in the armrest and call it a day...
I really like the convenience of the AUDI phone system but AUDI really ruins the freedom of choice for it's customers here!
Any suggestions?
Erik

Oooh! Good point!
 

I have a T720g GSM phone and I was looking to hook an aftermarket cradle into the system (via the as-of-yet unfound DB25 connector). However, I'm not sure the built-in cell antenna on the roof is going to work with GSM.

I suppose you could cut the cradle wire harness and add your own antenna (what else would cause the GSM phone not to work with the existing setup?).

No.
 

We stupidly bought the cradle on the advice of the salesguy, who was certain a previous buyer had gotten a non-Audi V60 to work.

When we found out that it was, at the time, $625 US for the Audi V60, we forgot about it. Even though the Audi phone has dropped about 33%, we're sticking with the cheap V60.

The Audi system is a very slick setup. It is just not worth the money & the limitations.

Noob questions - is the Audi V60 different from the AT&T V60?

Knowing how Audi and others work
 

they've tweaked it just a little to make it proprietary. The pins may be different or the internal coding may prevent certain things.

IMHO, of course. Just based on my experience with carmakers (my BMW had an Alpine changer in the trunk that you couldn't get directly from Alpine, only as a BMW part).