Is bigger never better?

Tech expos continue to showcase concept watch-phones, neck-pendant phones and even ring-phones weighing just a few grams.

But how small is too small? Older users, or the 'non youth' segment, can struggle with tinier devices. One associate spent months trying to find a basic, Nokia candybar with plain, 'non-funky' buttons big enough for his large man-fingers to press and his weakening eyes to read.

Numerical digits are one thing, but in the Age of Text, trying to read the miniscule group of alphabetic letters below each number can be a considerable challenge for the long-sighted. And the smaller and lighter a device, the more fragile it is likely to be. Witness the problems with cracked iPod nanos.

Screens present the biggest struggle, creating a kind of eternal tug of war. Laptops increase their screens until they're branded desktop replacements. Sub-notebooks arrive and shrink down until they're trespassing on PDA territory. PDAs are caught between the desire to offer bigger, video and internet-friendly screens and be tiny enough to fit on a wristwatch, like the Palm OS Fossil. Digital cameras and mp3 players get tinier and lighter, but users want the biggest LCD displays possible to preview photos and watch music videos.

Unsurprisingly, a market for 'boomer-friendly' gadgets is emerging, along with related products such as screen magnifiers that clip onto a PDA. Microsoft sells a Comfort Optical Mouse that magnifies the part of the screen the user is currently mousing over.

Voice-input and text-to-speech software, originally targeted to the special needs market, is also going mainstream. Mac OSX's VoiceOver allows any user to access the Mac through speech and audible cues. Electronic voices can read out the text in documents to the hard-of-sight and those who forgot to bring their reading glasses to the office.

Even in the last millennium (ie 1999 and before) there were complaints that gadgets - particularly mobile phones - were getting too small. So it's nothing new. But in the 1990s hardly anyone was reading their email on their mobile phone, or trying to surf the web. Some analysts now believe that the 'smaller is better' mentality is finally ending, as companies concentrate more on providing applications than shrinking hardware.

Multifunction devices are a possible answer - having one gadget to act as your mobile, digital camera, voice recorder, mp3 player and general PDA does cut down on kilos. But there's still pressure to make these devices as small as possible.

A more 21st century solution is lightweight, flexible screens - like the long-promised e-newspaper that can be rolled up and tucked into a pocket once the day's stories are read through. Fujitsu is developing an e-paper that holds a colour image even without a power-supply. Another answer might be for multiple tiny gadgets to share a screen, such as Mitsubishi's Scopo head-mount display, as well as sharing some sort of foldable wireless data input device.