[topside844]

The features you are looking for are enabled by Enhanced BT/USB (and BMW Office) and not BMW Apps.

BMW Apps allows for Pandora / Facebook integration, video-out on iPod/iPad/iPhone4S and older, reads your text messages aloud, and also integrates with navigation so you can use BMW ConnectedDrive to record driving logs and push coordinates to the nav system remotely. Nav is therefor required for BMW apps.

I primarily wanted album art, streaming BT audio for music (and Siri's turn-by-turn directions), contacts, text message display, etc and that's all enabled with BMW Assisit w/Enhanced BT & USB so that's all I got and left out nav / apps.

BMW Assist itself has nothing directly to do with these features, but adding the BMW Assist option adds a "combox" to your car which takes over all USB & BT control in addition to just adding a cellular modem to your car to phone home to BMW when you hit the Assist button. The combox is more intelligent than the stock BT/USB controller and offers more bluetooth profiles beyond just BT-Phone such as BT Audio for streaming music/navigation, and BT Message Access Protocol (MAP) for pulling text messages. It also enables further USB functionality enabling you to pull album art. (However, pulling contacts is a standard USB feature.)

Hope this answers all your questions!