3M has announced a partnership with a yet unnamed leading consumer electronics company to bring its ultra-portable projector to the market.

The company is hoping to become the first to release such a product, ahead of big names like Texas Instruments and Microvision.

This tiny projector will be able to attach to cell phones, cameras, and laptops to display an image up to 50 inches, diagonally. Although its not exactly a built-in pico projector, it’s capable of displaying a fairly large image and will work with other devices - not just a cell phone. It also looks portable enough, as we don’t know many people who would complain about carrying that tiny thing in their pockets.

The device is estimated to sell between $300 and $400, with prices dropping to $150 within five years. Count us in, we want one of these!

[About Projectors via Gizmodo]

Designer Hung Chih Wang has come up with what he thinks a portable printer should look like. His tiny device, called “Trak,” attaches to the back of a laptop screen to take up as little room as possible.

Trak is powered by USB, and comes complete with a detachable printer head for even more space savings when lugging the thing around.

Unfortunately, the concept has its downsides as well. You are probably already asking yourself if it’s even possible to fit a printer into such a small package, and we highly doubt it. The design also seems to be limited to laptops with the same width, although that could be easily fixed with some sort of extendable grips on the printer. The open nature of the design would probably lead to quick dirt and grime accumulation, causing poor-quality printouts.

Nevertheless, we applaud the designer for trying to tackle the problem of portable printers with such a stylish concept.

[Via yanko design]

Blu-ray lasers have just gotten smaller and far more efficient, now able to burn Blu-ray content at a much faster 6x write speed.

This is a great improvement for Blu-ray in portable devices and could lead to thinner laptops where the laser won’t be the limiting factor in size.

We can’t wait until these new revisions are in laptops, and better yet, until the technology gets smaller and more efficient once again and we can burn at 12x or even higher.

Maybe some day the MacBook Air will be able to squeeze one of these in.

The Yuno PC mug is a regular coffee mug that includes a touchscreen display wrapped around the outside. You can customize the screen to display email, weather, traffic, stocks, daily comics, or whatever else you like to read in the morning. It also has a feature which lets you choose a custom screensaver image to display.

We think this would make a really cool device, despite it seeming a bit gimmicky at first glance. The ability to check small bits of information without actually needing a full-fledged computer in front of you is quite useful even to the non-business world. It’s impressive that technology has become so compact that people are dreaming up such unique places to use it.

Of course this is just a concept, so we’re not sure if it’ll ever make it to the market. We wouldn’t mind sipping our coffee or tea from one of these every morning though.