While palm-stretching cellphones are the norm, there are smaller mobile phones that are equally efficient. Today, billions of transistors can be squeezed onto a fingernail-sized chip.
As technology advances at a breakneck speed, here are six ‘miniature’ gadgets or inventions that could supersize your life.
Power Up
Keen on switching to solar panels but can’t find the space? Try a plug-and-play solar panel.
In homes across Germany, these shrunk-down panels — small enough to be installed in a balcony or hung over a window railing — are powering a quiet transformation. “You don’t need to drill or hammer anything,” one user told The New York Times.
“You just hang them from the balcony like wet laundry.” The solar power generated is routed to an inverter to be converted into an alternating current. That can then be plugged into a traditional wall socket to power your home. A complete plug-in set, which includes the panel, mounting, an inverter and cable, costs around 400 euros. While each lightweight panel produces just enough electricity to charge a laptop, the devices have grown immensely popular in Germany after new laws relaxed rules around their installation. In the first half of the year, the country added nine gigawatts of photovoltaic capacity, according to one German regulator.
Game On
Roughly the size of a home projector, this Geekom IT13 mini PC packs the power of a full-sized computer and can support up to four displays. The machine from the Taiwanese company features a 13th Gen Intel Core i9-13900H processor with 14 cores, 20 threads, 24MB of cache and can clock speeds up to 5.40 GHz. Despite those specs, it draws only 90 watts of power, which is roughly a quarter as much electricity as a standard desktop computer. If you’re a gamer, a stock trader or in any job that requires multiple monitors with minimal lag, this tiny but powerful computer is ideal. Available on Amazon, it retails at roughly $899.
Putting The ‘Small’ In Small Screen
When it comes to television, advertisers scream that bigger is better. Yet, the TinyTV 2, which started as a Kickstarter project, proves that the opposite could also be true. The TinyTV2 is the brainchild of US company TinyCircuits, which designs and manufactures miniature electronic products. Their TinyTV 2 is a one-inch screen with a tiny half-inch speaker and an even tinier remote control, weighing three grams. It comes preloaded with videos. Users can toggle between channels by turning the knobs. You can load your own videos using an MP4 converter available on the company website.
Speck In The Sky
How light can we make flying machines? In July, researchers in China announced that they had developed the world’s smallest, lightest solar-powered drone, weighing just over four grams. That’s equal to a teaspoonful of sugar (4.2 grams). According to an article in Nature, the ultralight micro aerial vehicle, dubbed the Coulomb Fly, is propelled by an electrostatic motor and powered by very light solar panels. But researchers say the hummingbird-sized drone is still two to three years away from real-life use.
The Pill Will See You Now
PillBot is a tiny, ingestible camera device from California-based medical technology company Endiatx.
It will help doctors remotely examine the gastrointestinal tract of a patient with exceptional precision and control. The pill shaped device, about the size of a pistachio, is currently in clinical trials in the US.
Sunburn Alert
First introduced at CES 2018, the L’Oreal UV Sense is one of the world’s smallest wearables. Smaller in circumference than an M&M, this battery-free, wearable electronic sensor measures UV exposure. Users just need to download an app on their smartphone and swipe the phone over the device to see their exposure to the sun, either for that day or over time (UV Sense can store up to three months of data). The app also sends real-time phone messages when people have exceeded their daily safe sun limit.