Tiny tech gets even smaller

Tiny tech may be all the rage, but where will it end - and, anyway, is it worth owning the smallest widget in the world?

Leaner laps

The Sharp Muramasa PC-UM10 (around £1,875) is the smallest full-size laptop - at only 16.6mm thick, thanks to the keyboard sinking into the laptop as you fold the screen down. Unfortunately, its anorexia leaves no room for disk drives and the battery life is just three hours. Not good enough for £2,000, says Mike Browne, technical editor of What Laptop and Handheld PC, who believes dinky, laptop-lites are losing their allure. "You need a full-sized keyboard and you want ways of getting your data off your laptop." But then, there is a dinky answer to that too: keyring-sized Flash USB drives that store up to 1GB (enough for 1,000 high-res pictures - the 512MB version costs £464.95). The catch? You still need to install drivers from a disk.

Cut!

For the Roman Polanski (5ft 2in when last measured) in all of us: the Sony DCR-IP5 and IP7 (from around £1,400) are the small-est digital camcorders yet.

How has Sony managed to beat the already minuscule JVC GR-DVP1 (one centimetre wider but £400 cheaper)? By creating a new tape format. Micro-MV uses compression similar to MP3 music to squeeze more recordings onto less tape. Result? A tape 70 per cent smaller than the usual MiniDV cassettes. Impressive, but soon to be trumped, according to Jake Williams, editor of What Camcorder. "One prototype shown this year was the size of two chewing-gum packs." But even the Sony may already be too small. "A bigger camcorder is easier to control, balances better and, because the microphone is further from components, sounds better." His advice: go for features, not size.

What about still pictures? The Olympus Camedia C-40 Zoom (£700) is the smallest digital camera to turn out photo-quality prints. It squeezes a 2.8x optical lens, superior smanual controls and four mega-pixel resolution into a box barely bigger than a cigarette packet. But will smaller mean better? No. "The Olympus is an ideal size," says William Cheung, editor of Digital Photo.

Miniature music

While the smallest digital camera may confound large fingers, the smallest MP3 players could easily disappear behind the sofa. The Samsung Baby Yepp YP-20 (from around £110) is one of the tiniest. It does everything you need an MP3 player to do, ie, play MP3 music. But could there be one smaller? "Designers are no longer restricted to a minimum size, " says David Price, technology editor of Hi-Fi World and Computer Audio. "But it's impractical to have something smaller than two centimetres square." MP3 is, however, increasingly being built into other products: watches, phones, even fridges.

The boring old CD player has even been shrunk to fit the new minusculism: the Philips eXpanium EXP 401 (costing around £150) plays three-inch discs loaded with MP3, giving you three hours of music on each disc.

The drawback: the discs cost much more than normal recordable CDs.

"Pocket" PC at last

Nice irony: to accommodate the power of Microsoft's Pocket PC system, palmtop computers are having to get bigger. But the latest Toshiba e570 (less than £400) is the smallest pocket PC. It's noticeably smaller than its rivals, such as the Compaq iPaq (£500), and the next lot will be even smaller. "Removable storage cards are the problem," says James Morris, editor of PC Pro magazine. "Manufactur-ers don't know which type to support, so many are putting in two or three different memory card slots." When they sort it out, genuinely pocketable Pocket PCs will be here.

Tiny talk

The smallest mobile as of this month is the Ericsson T66 (around £180 with connection). Measuring 90x40x17mm, it pips the previous title-holder by a few millimetres, while squeezing in EMS text-messaging with pictures and a 150-hour stand-by time. But can it be beaten? "There's no call for further miniaturisation, " says Perdita Patterson, editor of What Mobile. In fact, the next generation might be bigger: "3G phones where you'll download video and images will need much bigger screens." The good news is your tiny mobile phone won't get trumped next week by Kevin from sales. The bad news? "Whenever highly miniaturised products first appear, they seem to have lots of teething problems," says Patterson.

Baby beamer

The smallest PC projector on the market is the NEC LT150 (£4,800, and around 200mm square). Can it be beaten? Alan Sircom, associate editor of Home Entertainment, thinks so: "Marantz already has one the size of a grapefruit. True, it's about as good as a grapefruit at projecting, but projectors are getting smaller, better and cheaper all the time."