The Current Situation

When you buy one of these products today, you think you are buying a device. Actually, there is a basic shell of a device, but all the good stuff is in the software. Any software person knows when he turns on his cell phone, for example, that he has to wait for it to "boot up." And that numeric keypad you use to dial phone numbers is also the keyboard you use to "program the software." By that I mean it is one of the mechanisms by which you can put various information (such as stored phone numbers) into the phone's memory.

Effectively, this device consists of three parts:

• The "hardware"

• Embedded "software"

• The batteries, without which, I hasten to add, nothing will work

Today, this device is packaged as two parts: the phone, which contains both the hardware and the software, and the batteries. That is just the way things have evolved.

Now this poses an interesting dilemma.

All the intelligence is in the software. So when you want to upgrade the phone, you have two options:

• Somehow upgrade the software which, today, means either replacing or reprogramming the chip in the phone.

• Depending on the economics, replace the whole phone with a new one which, in turn, might be exactly the same shell with a newer version of the chip.

Other devices take a slightly different tack: You can hook them up to your PC, get on the vendor's Web site, and download a new version of the software. Sometimes called an oil change, this operation allows you to replace the software with a more recent version. The oil change analogy is a little dangerous for some people, because it implies that your software could be replaced for you automatically at regular intervals without revealing what internal changes the vendor made, and they find that notion scary. For others, the whole process of using the PC to accomplish the objective seems more akin to changing an engine instead of just the oil in it. That is, they do not view it as a simple task.