That's what I thought... Perphaps someday, someone could hack the OS to fully support unicode. Meanwhile I have to replace those chars with "english-only" chars. 
There's a couple pieces to it:
- Fix up the msdosfs code to deal with these characters properly. Easy, we have the source to all of this code via GPL.
- Fix up the DMS population routines to deal with these characters in tags. Easy if you don't mind using the PhatHack Media Manager instead of the Phatnoise one, as the developer has all the sources to his version.
- Make sure all of the proprietary Phatnoise software in the PhatBox (both in flash and on disk) knows what to do with these tags and filenames. Quite difficult unless someone wants to re-write the software from scratch.
- Figure out which head units support what characters and add mapping tables to the Phatnoise software one item above. Likely difficult as it will require monitoring communication between an iPod / MP3 changer / etc. and the radio to see what protocol is being used and how the special characters are encoded, and then testing to see if the Phatbox can be modified to use that protocol or whether the head unit will accept that type of encoding using the protocol the Phatbox is already using. Time-consuming as we'd need to get someone who had a car and Phatbox that were working (other than this) and had access to an iPod or MP3 changer for comparison purposes. Then we need to get a developer who can think on their feet and who has hardware to monitor the signals on the cables, and get them together at a mutually-convenient place and time to do a lot of testing.
I pursued this a bit with BlitzSafe (they're the people who make the adapter that sits between an Phatbox and a BMW), to try to get a couple of annoying bugs fixed: 1) Unlike the real BMW CD changer, if you talk on the included BMW cell phone or do anything else that mutes the BMW stereo, the Phatbox doesn't pause, so when you get off your long phone call you expect the PhatBox to pick up where it left off, near the end of Call on Me at the end of Bad Company's Straight Shooter, but it has been merrily chugging along and you're greeted by Who Let the Dogs Out by the Baha Men. [Yes, this actually happened to me and was very disconcerting.] Or 2) You're driving along with your StealthOne radar detector interface and you pass through an area with lots of radar signals (false or real, doesn't matter). The additional bus traffic causes the BlitzSafe adapter to reset itself. This interrupts the "I am fine, how are you?" chatter between the BlitzSafe and the BMW radio, resetting the Phatbox. Plus, the car radio won't believe there is a changer attached for a good 3 minutes after everything else has picked up their marbles and gone back to work. When the BlitzSafe drops out, the BMW radio switches to the next source, which is usually AM 1 (not programmed) so you get a blast of static.
BlitzSafe offered to give me access to the code and a very nominal paycheck if I fixed these problems (PhatNoise wasn't buying any more adapters from them, and less than 500 StealthOne units were made, so there was a very limited intersection of these issues). I declined as it would have put me under a NDA.
If one of the PhatHack developers manages to get control of the 8051 so we can send arbitrary messages to the head unit, I'd buy a MP3-capable CD changer from BMW and the new radio module it needs, and figure out the protocol so that BMWs could display info on the NAV screen as well as with SSA.
