Portable speakers for MP3 players are two a penny, but not many are not far off a penny in size: Landport's Cubes are though. They're just an inch cube, but fit in stereo speakers, 3.5-mm jack plug, rechargeable batteries and a mini-USB port. They'll run for 4-5 hours on a charge, too. Just don't go expecting bone-rattling volume as they pump out a similarly tiny 0.8-watts. Out soon in Japan for $US25. [Slashgear]

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The name Maxon Electronics probably doesn't mean too much to most of you, but that doesn't mean you haven't seen their stuff. They're an Australian company with a history in two-way radios (exciting) and digital modems - they provide Telstra and BigPond over 400,000 of their wireless NextG modems.

But their most recent product - the Visimax portable projector - is the start for bigger and better things for the company. The projector itself is tiny - it happily fits into the palm of your hand (it measures in at 27 x 58 x 60mm) and weighs just 120 grams. Yet it can throw a picture up to 60 inches in size without blinking its little LED powered eye.

It has a VGA resolution, 15 lumens worth of brightness, a contrast ratio of 200:1 and a manual focus dial. There's a mono speaker on board, but you can output stereo sound via the headphone port or the composite video cable that comes in the box.

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At first glance, the iMe (sorry!) iKit handtop computer sounds pretty fandabbydozy: it's a tiny, folding, 2.8-inch screen, QWERTY keyboard, Wi-Fi-enabled, webcam and Bluetooth-packing, multimedia-playing computer. But then you learn that it's got just a 3-hour battery life in operation, doesn't have 3G connectivity and if you even want to connect a mobile broadband dongle you'll have to get one with an "optional" internal USB connection. It's basically the tiny portable PDA computer we all fancied back in the 90s.

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Researches at Osaka University have been doing some really tiny writing lately, using their newly-invented atomic pen, which can draw atom by atom. The resulting letters, the words "Si" for silicon or "Yes" in Spanish, measure only 2 x 2 nanometers, roughly 40,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. According to Masayuki Abe, one of the project scientists, they have reached a limit impossible to surpass:

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Scientists at Northwestern University have demonstrated a new nano-printing technology by printing the Beijing Olympics emblem 15,000 times, each logo so small the whole print run fits inside one square centimeter. 2,500 of the images, made 20,000 90-nanometer dots, would fit on a grain of rice. The polymer pen lithography uses an array of millions of tiny flexible polymer "pens" that can be used to make marks on various different nano-scales, and in this case deposit "ink" made of 16-mercaptohexadecanoic acid onto a gold substrate (what else would do, in Olympic season?) The team thinks that the technique, which can print out tiny dot-matrix imagery, will find uses in computational tools, medical diagnostics and the pharmaceutical industry. The study is published today in Science Express. [Physorg]

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Researchers at USC's Information Sciences Institute produced this amazing pyramid, around 30 microns across, which may one day be used to deliver precise micro- or nano-doses of medication. The structures, dubbed "voxels" are made of silicon, cut into flats and then folded up and sealed to enclose tiny volumes of space inside. The team hasn't stopped at pyramids either— they've tried flat envelopes, cubes and partial dodecahedra, but these don't close together the way the pyramid does.

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The chaps at Super Talent are not only incredibly modest, talented and super, but they must also be fantastically tiny to have put together the world's smallest 8GB flash drive. (Flawless logic, I'm sure you'll agree.) Retailing at US$35, the price is pretty reasonable, at least until you drop it into your chest hair and lose it forever.

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Since I have gigantic wax-magnet ear canals, I'm probably the wrong market for these Klipsch IMAGE in-ear earphones. They're the smallest, lightest in-ear buds you can get (claim by Klipsch so far unverified), but will cost you $349 for the pleasure of having a pair made out of aluminum and copper. We're not sure how well Klipsch's speaker experience will translate into making earbuds, but even if they sound mediocre, you'll be able to prevent them from being stuck inside your ear with the locking rings. [Klipsch]

The "Super Tiny Micro SD Card Reader" gets about as small as physically possible to read Micro SD and and T-Flash media, while still connecting to a normal USB 2.0 port. At a mere 25.5 x 12 x 4.5 mm, the reader is dwarfed by keys—I mean, just look at that picture—unless Brando is using the old "big key trick" again.

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TDC's new OV6920 CameraChip is the world's smallest CMOS chip at just 1/18-inch (1.4mm). This means that the attached camera setup is just 3.2mm in total size—or in layman's terms—never change outside of your own bedroom again. Shooting at a low resolution of 328 x 250, the chip is configurable for NTSC output and can automatically control color saturation, exposure and gain. Sipping from a low 3.3V DC power supply, the chip will be useful in low power applications—from medical pills to spy gear to toys. While the practical applications for tiny cameras are limitless, technological breakthroughs like this just reinforce the inevitable future: We will all be on camera all the time...and that Futurama's fabled UltraPorn is on its way. [TDC via therawfeed]