Your world in your pocket: Hi-tech devices shrink to tiny sizes

Gadgets are getting smaller and cleverer. Our favourite is the $4 device to help sleep apnoea.

Supplied Editorial Mini devices

The year is half over and we’ve seen a mountain of gadgets. Apple Watch and wearables generally; virtual reality viewers; 3-D printers that are also scanners; drones; the explosion of the ultra-high-definition format (4K) for televisions and gaming; incredible high-resolution screens on phones; faster mobile networks — the list goes on.

In terms of impact, Elon Musk’s Powerwall lithium-ion battery unit takes the cake. It stores renewable energy locally. Powerwall units are already sold out until mid-next year.

Meanwhile, the nanotechnology revolution continues. Computer components are even tinier. For example, a computer graphics card for gamers released this month by chipmaker AMD has 8.5 billion transistors. It means you can buy a fast, high-end computer that fits in your pocket, complete with one terabyte of storage, with a low-power central processing unit and large yet cheaper solid state drives. Lower power means less heat generated, less ventilation needed, hence less space.

Here are some of the newest gadgets that show, this year, small is beautiful and remarkable.

Raydget PowerBox V

It’s not every day you can put a computer in your pocket that has a powerful Intel Core i7 processor, 8GB of RAM memory and a 1TB solid state drive. That’s enough to store the text from The Complete Works of Shakespeare 200,000 times. The computer supports two displays and it has up to four USB 3.0 ports. A high-end PowerBox, from Taiwanese firm Communication Technology, costs about $840.

Airing

CPAP machines save marriages and lives. The relentless snoring from obstructive sleep apnoea can enrage partners. For the sufferer, the continual cycle of blood oxygen levels plummeting and recovering under stress can cause sudden cardiac death, stroke and metabolic disease. Some people can’t adjust to sleeping with tethered masks. Airing, a small device for the nose, promises to end this. It has hundreds of tiny bellows that contract to blow pressurised air up the sufferer’s nose. Each Airing cost $4 each, and comes with an eight-hour zinc battery. It may sound cheap but you need a new one every night because of the embedded battery’s short life. That means about $1420 a year. For some, that’s the only solution.

ASRock Beebox

It’s another small-is-beautiful desktop. The Beebox looks perfect for lounge-room PCs and media centres. ASRock says it is totally silent. It’s a bit bigger than Raydget but you can still hold it in one hand. It supports three monitors, has very fast Wi-Fi and works as a wireless access point. It supports ultra-high-definition video playback and has three USB 3.0 ports for connecting other devices and one fast new USB 3.0 Type-C port. You get a remote, too. Coming soon.

Dongle PCs: Intel ­Compute Stick, Google Chromebit

Dongle PCs are little sticks you can plug into a TV or monitor HDMI slot that turns them into all-in-one PCs. Intel’s Compute Stick has a quad-core Atom processor and HD graphics. A Linux Ubuntu version costs about $160. A high-storage version running Windows 8.1 is about $230. A great idea but some reports suggest the compute stick may not be powerful enough for many users. Not to be outdone, Google has a similar stick called Chromebit, built by ASUS. It’s the size of a cigar. It’s built on the reputation of Chromecast but does more. You can browse, read Gmail and perform other Chromecast actions. It is not yet available here, but in the US costs $US100 ($129).

Samsung 1 Terabyte solid state drive

One terabyte of memory (1000 gigabytes) is lots of storage in the palm of your hand. Take the 2010 Encyclopaedia Britannica: it’s estimated you need 1GB to store the text in its 32 volumes (without images). So this ­little drive weighing 32g and ­measuring 9.6mm x 71mm x 53mm can store the words of 1000 32-volume Britannica collections. It offers read-write speeds of 450MB a ­second through a USB3.0 con­nection. You can password-protect the drive and secure its contents with 256-bit encryption. Cost: $799.

Micro Drone 3.0

There are myriad small toy drones in the market, but they’re not necessarily the quality of the palm-sized Micro Drone 3.0. It offers HD video streaming to your phone, although delivering that depends on Wi-Fi signal quality. But it does have a 720 x 1280 pixel HD camera that shoots video at 30 frames per second. It claims a range of 15m tethered to a smartphone or 90m to a 2.4GHz radio, and motion sensors to aid level flying. It weighs 71g. You can fly it using Google cardboard for a first-person experience, but to do so outdoors is against civil aviation regulations. Micro Drone 3.0 is a successfully funded Indiegogo project. Cost: $US150 plus postage.

Instamic

Dubbed the GoPro of audio, it’s a tiny digital recording mic that fits between your thumb and index finger. There are two models — Go and Pro. Go records mono and dual-mono while the Pro records stereo. Both record four hours of uncompressed audio at 48Hz, 24 bit. While Go is splashproof, Pro is waterproof, so you could capture the natural sound of a rainforest. Pro $129, Go $99. indiegogo.com

Lumopack

Battery chargers are proliferating in the market much as aliens did in HG Wells’s The War of the Worlds. Many of them are wireless. But for sheer convenience, I like the sound of LumoPack by start-up Lyte Systems. It is claimed to fully charge a phone in 30 minutes. What’s more, it will charge an iPhone 6 in six minutes and Samsung Galaxy S6 in nine minutes. Provided the LumoPack lives up to this mighty promise, and we’re yet to test it, it looks like a winner. It costs $US89 on kickstarter.com and is due in October.

Skylight

Why bother with a digital photo frame? They’re so 2005, you say. In my view the picture frame never reached its potential. Skylight is one that breaks the mould. Instead of plugging a USB stick of photos into the back, you send them by Wi-Fi. So if your grandmother is in hospital, you can beam her the latest family photos and they’ll automatically display in front of her. Each Skylight has an email ­address, so sending is easy. Available from skylightframe.strikingly.com, for $US109.