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Using MEMS to Miniaturize Mobile Phones
securitas writes: "The NY Times has a feature on using microelectro-mechanical systems (MEMS) in cell phones to replace bulky passive components like the filters, resonators and duplexers that make up most of the size of today's phones. In theory, they say, you could have a cell phone in a ring on your finger. Besides making everyone seem like James Bond, a ring-phone would give new meaning to the phrase 'Talk to the hand.'"
A vibrator in a wedding ring should keep the "little missus" happy in a discrete way... ;-)
The owls are not what they seem
As several people have noted, you still have a problem with battery size. Also, you have a minimum size for the speaker and microphone to produce a usable signal (the only reason in-the-ear headsets can be THAT small is because they ARE in your ear - to be heard from an inch away from your ear they need be bigger).
And was that guy in the other car flipping you the bird, or just extending his antenna?
Although a ring-sized phone will be a practical impossibility, it can be used in a more practical way if it is combined with something else.
The current "best" PDA-phone combination is arguably the Nokia 9210 (or yet-to-be-released 9290 in the US). Although the size is perfectly ok for myself, the weight is not. A ring-sized phone embedded inside a PDA could be the planned direction for this miniaturization.
Palm is too bulky a unit to be used as a phone, contrary to whatever Handspring say about its Treo. The 9210 is too heavy and too thick for most people. Imagine a phone with Palm functionality, the integration of 9210, and the weight of 80g. This ring-phone technology could be the answer to our prayers.
All of this so far is off-topic, but if rf MEMs could replace capacitive filters and resonators, it could help reduce the demand for coltan. This feeble attempt to be on-topic is purely speculative, though, as I am not a wireless engineer and the NYT article lacks details about the materials being used in these devices.
Tantalum tends to be used in low frequency and power circuits. Quite honestly, if you didn't need a mobile phone the size of a domino, you could make them a bit bigger and use plain ordinary electrolytic capacitors instead.
Of course, they use other nasty chemicals, so you just can't win...