How to create smart playlists for iPhone only?

Hi, in iTunes on my Mac I have a bunch of playlists, like

• All Music -- this excludes spoken word, comedy, stuff like that
• Classical Music
• Recently added -- the 60 most recently added songs

There is far more music in my library than will fit onto my iPhone, so I created a playlist called "iPhone" and dropped all the music into it that should be on the phone. Then, I disabled the "Sync entire music library" setting in iTunes for my phone, and had it sync the new "iPhone" playlist. That worked ok, all the music I want is now on the phone.

But how do I make the other playlists work correctly? If I sync the "Classical Music" playlist, it will add all classical music onto the phone, instead of applying the smart rules just to whatever classical songs currently exist on the phone. I think what I was expecting is when the Classical Music playlist was synced over, it would dynamically build the list based on what music existed on the phone, instead of on what music exists in iTunes on my computer.

Same with the Recently Added. It wants to bring over new songs from my computer instead of just showing the most recently added songs out of the existing ones on the phone.

Is there a way to do this? Or perhaps a better way to choose which music gets put on your phone? Should I have synced by artist and album instead of creating a playlist with that music in it and then syncing that?

How do you guys handle the situation where you have more music on the computer than on the phone, you want to choose what stuff goes onto the phone, but you still want to have iPhone-relevant playlists (e.g., 80s Music, Classical, Top 40, etc.)?

Thanks!

Thanks for your reply! Is that the only way to do it? I thought the checkmarks were a holdover from the old days. It's just kind of unwieldy, checking every song, one at a time like that.

Hey, I think I figured it out. If you manage your music manually then any smart playlists you create within the context of the device only apply to that device.

In other words, say I only copied two Beatles albums to the iPhone, but I have a smart playlist for all Beatles albums in iTunes. If iTunes manages my music then when I sync that playlist, all Beatles albums will get copied onto the device. If the music is managed manually, however, then the playlist will only show the two albums that already exist on the phone -- which is exactly what I want.

Thanks for your help. I actually did try your suggestion before I first posted and it works, but it isn't as "clean" as I'd like. Looks like I'm back to manually managing the music.