Consumer Products
As of 2010 most portable music players support firmware upgrades. Some companies use firmware updates to add new playable file formats (encodings); iriver added the Vorbis format this way, for instance. Other features that may change with firmware updates include the GUI or even the battery life. Most mobile phones have a Firmware Over The Air firmware upgrade capability for much the same reasons; some may even be upgraded to enhance reception or sound quality, illustrating the fact that firmware is used at more than one level in complex products (in a CPU-like microcontroller versus in a digital signal processor, in this particular case).
Read more about this topic: Firmware
Famous quotes containing the words consumer and/or products:
“The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one’s own destruction, has become a “biological” need.”
—Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979)
“Good wine needs no bush,
And perhaps products that people really want need no
hard-sell or soft-sell TV push.
Why not?
Look at pot.”
—Ogden Nash (1902–1971)