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Really, no gPhone user will want to upgrade an old toy!

T-Mobile has said that the rumours (that you can't upgrade your gPhone model G1) are false. Does T-Mob not know the difference between "updating" and "upgrading"?

But we have a Google exec's word on the fact that you almost certainly can't upgrade. Twitter followers of Jean-Baptiste Queru, an Android developer, spotted a tweet from him: "As much as I'm hoping that it'll be possible to somehow continue updating the G1, I can't promise anything," was his comment.

Did he really mean "updating"? Probably not. He probably means, you can't upgrade from the current version - you can't, as it were, take a PC running Windows 95, and install Vista on it. But updates? That may be different; service packs may be essential to protect operators.

The current G1 software is called "Cupcake" and after that, Android plans "Donut" and "Eclair." They were unveiled back in May this year. And the problem is simple: Cupcake is the same thing as Donut - now.

But it won't be the same thing for long. Donut will be upgraded as new Android features come along, but Cupcake won't be.

The phone is sold by T-Mobile in the US. It has rejected any suggestion that Queru's tweet means doom for the G1. "We plan to continue working with Google to introduce future software updates to the T-Mobile G1," T-Mobile said in a statement. "Reports to the contrary are inaccurate," it told a newsletter, Fierce Wireless.

Well, probably, they aren't entirely inaccurate. What seems clear is that Donut and Eclair are going to get bigger. Cupcake can't, because it has to fit into the current gPhone design - the G1.

The actual amount of memory inside the G1 phone isn't the subject of universal agreement - some say around 70 megabytes (almost certainly wrong!) and others say 256 megabytes. But that's not enough for Google's future plans for Android.

"We knew that internal flash space was going to be very tight on the G1 and we kept the system partition tight on purpose," was Queru's comment.

What one pundit has predicted is simple: "There will be updates to Cupcake, eliminating problems with malware and security, as threats emerge," says Greybeard.

There will be threats. Israeli firm DroidSecurity, "an innovative new start-up dedicated to protecting mobile devices, smartphones and netbooks," today launched DroidSecurity Internet Security Suite, described as "the first full-featured consumer anti-malware and physical security app for Google’s Android operating system."

Those updates, T-Mobile will get. But upgrades (a different matter!) to next generation software like Donut_2010 or Eclair_2011, simply won't be designed with the restrictions of the G1 in mind. Come to that, you might not even be able to cram them into the G2.

But who cares? What self-respecting geek would want to run a G1 in a year's time?