[m5james]

Yes, I currently have a Bluetooth dongle inside the armrest (added pics to above post) that then connects via a standard 3.5mm cord to the aux input jack...was only like $3 on eBay and works perfectly. I have no desire to put music onto a USB stick to play MP3's when I've got MP3's downloaded on my phone for no service type situations while on a roadtrip.

Yeah, I've got to do the same thing in my Harley then...turn on the phones hotspot, then usually the tablet will see the WiFi and automatically connect. At a certain point though, it's still just easier and quicker to let everything run through my phone and just Bluetooth the sound to the stereo. The X5M's screen being a far more integral part of the vehicle, it'd likely end up wanting to control everything through the screen since this stereo will prevent me from being able to prop my phone onto the dash like I currently do.

Is that extra $20 per month give you 4G speeds? I'll have to look into FreedomPop, I've never heard of it but I'm guessing it's something we'd still have to pay for or is that kinda of like what I mentioned before where we trick the stereo into thinking it's a phone, via a SIM in this case? I'm cheap as hell sometimes, so I may be more tolerant of having to turn on tethering (manually or via triggering apps that will turn it on automatically once connected to a power source) vs paying an extra $240 a year to have internet directly in the car. More often than not I'm already streaming music within the house, then I head to the garage and just pair up to the car instead. I've got unlimited data on my phone, but I'm not sure if I've got unlimited tethering, so I'd have to weight the pricing options of unlimited tethering vs going your route and adding a line kind of thing.

Internet aside, people have paid upwards of $3k for a larger screen like the NBT upgrade, so this is still a steal at $500...I may do it for that reason alone because it'll be a nice upgrade overall. I've coded the car to play DVD in Motion and the angle of the stock screen sucks for when the kids wanna watch movies, so this'll benefit them as well.