New gadgets appear with astonishing rapidity but the one thing they’ll have in common in 2009 is a slim profile. The idea grabbed the headlines when Apple slipped a laptop into an envelope and has quickly spread among designers of devices large and small.


Take a sideways glance at the latest crop of TVs and you’ll notice they are razor-thin. Hitachi, for example, intends to sell a 94cm LCD TV with a thickness of just 15mm, down from the 38mm-thick model sold in 2008. Plasma TVs are slimming down as well.


“One reason the new TVs are so thin is the shrinking of the motherboard by the reduction of the chips that are required. What once took several chips can now be done with one or two,” says Steve Booth, senior editor of US-based trade newsletter Consumer Electronics Daily. “Also the light-emitting diodes used for illumination today make for a thinner display, compared with the cold-cathode fluorescent backlighting of previous generations.”


New technologies are also making a difference. Sony is leading the way in super-thin organic light emitting displays (OLEDs) that require no backlighting and perform better than current LCDs. Sony already sells a 28cm OLED TV and plans to debut a 69cm, 10mm-thin model, but the technology is likely to find its way into smaller devices. Sony and the Max Planck Institute have shown a prototype of a bendable, transparent OLED panel that may herald wrist-mounted displays and lighter-weight laptops.


Smaller gadgets are also fashion-model thin. Samsung’s S3 portable media player is the size of business card holder but still packs a music player, radio, recorder, photo viewer, video player and 4GB of memory into its tiny confines; Nokia’s 5800 touch-screen phone is only 1.5cm thick. But the future is with OLED, with Sony showing prototype displays with the thickness of a playing card.


Power for many of these devices may soon come from the sun. New, printable, thin-film panels are likely to make solar-powered devices more widespread. G24i, for instance, is using this technology in a solar mobile phone charger but the firm foresees 600 possible applications, making recharging mobile devices on the fly possible and sidestepping any difficulties caused by the lack of a reliable or incompatible power infrastructure.