Corrected. At the Nokia N75 event today, I wandered over to a music demo to find that the N75 is as compatible with Windows Media Player as Windows Mobile phones are! The N75 can sync multiple playlists between the desktop and the phone, and supports both purchased and subscription WMA music services.

The multiple-playlists feature, especially, is a big deal, because the Windows Media Player 10 that ships with most Windows Mobile phones can't sync more than one playlist to a mobile device. Fortunately, Windows Media Player 11 can. When handhelds only had 128 MB or so of memory, multiple playlist syncing didn't matter so much. But now that everyone's touting 2GB memory cards, you'll probably want to have five or six playlists on your device. I copied three playlists in Yahoo!'s subscription music manager, and three others in Windows Media Player 11. They coexisted happily on the phone, and filed easily into the phone's "playlist" area along with their associated songs.

The N75, along with the N80 and the new N95, has another cool multimedia trick up its sleeve: it's compatible with TivoToGo, which lets you download TV shows from your Tivo onto the phone. The option to automatically transcode videos for the phone requires Tivo Desktop Plus, which costs $24.95, but it works pretty seamlessly.

Note: This item has been amended to reflect the new capabilities of Windows Media Player 11.