World’s smallest PC just three inches long

Many of us are used to carrying USB sticks or devices to run on different computers. But what if the stick was the computer?


That’s the concept of the Cotton Candy, which has been demonstrated at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona. It resembles a USB stick, though the connection is actually a USB socket rather than a plug, meaning users can connect a keyboard or other device. The other end of the stick houses an HDMI cable for connecting to a monitor.




The inside of the stick is jam-packed with components, including a dual-core processor and a separate graphics chip, making it more powerful than some full-blown computers.


There’s also built in WiFi and Bluetooth, meaning you can access the Internet (assuming you have a wireless router) and use a wireless mouse. There’s also a micro-SD slot for storage and a micro-USB port on the side of the device. It currently runs either Ubuntu or Android Gingerbead.


Though it looks amazing to see all of this in such a small gadget, it’s really nothing more than the inside of a modern smartphone in a different packaging. Once you take away the screen, antenna, microphone, speaker, battery, you can see how the reduced size works.


The main drawback is that the selling point is size rather than price, with the Cotton Candy set to retail at $199. Given that it only reaches its potential in a still-imaginary world where every office or coffee shop has keyboards, mice and screens just waiting for the user to plug in a device, that seems a lot of money for something with little real use right now.


It’s certainly a contrast to a similar but less elegant gadget, the Raspberry Pi, which is all about cutting costs. That device is an uncased circuit board with a similar range of components and connections, plus video and audio jacks (and an Ethernet port in one of the two models.) It’s designed to cost either $25 or $35 and be used mainly as a permanent rather than portable set-up. The main goal is to make it an affordable device for children to be able to experiment with programming.