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For many of us, this creates an interesting problem because we now find ourselves carrying a cell phone alongside multiple handheld devices. This will change over time as these devices get more robust, but some of us will always prefer to keep the functions that these devices perform separate. After all, if you lose your cell phone, you at least still have a handheld device to send messages. If you lose the device that is your phone and handheld, you're completely out of luck.

That's what makes some of the research being done by Plantronics, a Santa Cruz, Calif.-based maker of communications headsets, more interesting than what a passing glance would normally tell you.

Already, Plantronics has a Bluetooth headset that can connect to a cell phone, a regular phone and an iPod. So now you can wirelessly listen to music from your iPod and when the phone rings, a signal will ask if you want to pick up that call. If you do, the headset will switch from your iPod to the phone.

This is an interesting concept because the Bluetooth specification implies that you may eventually be able to connect to as many eight sources. So someday, a single headset may be able automatically switch between your phones, MP3 player, home theater system and car audio system.

Furthermore, the number of protocols you can connect over will expand to include 802.11, which means you can roam over a much greater distance than the limited area associated with Bluetooth. And perhaps even more interesting is that eventually you will be able to issue voice commands through your headset to a handheld device that in turn is connected to a remote server.

It will be many years before all of this comes together, but it's interesting to see how a manufacturer of headset gear may actually be on the path to ultimately building communicators usually associated with Star Trek.

A lot of that innovative thinking comes from a team led by Owen Brown, Plantronics' CTO, and Darrin Caddes, the company's vice president of corporate design. Both executives are on a mission to change the way we interact with computers and a wide range of other devices in the next few years as headsets continue to evolve in ways that are likely to have a much bigger impact than most people are likely to guess today.