Wireless handheld devices, such as smartphones and tablets, are personal gadgets with multiple functionalities in addition to communication. As the space reserved for antennas is reduced in order to integrate other components such as large displays and batteries, there is a strong need to design small and multiband antennas as well as easy to integrate. In this letter, a novel approach that uses an electrically small nonresonant element of only 125 mm3 for smartphones and 250 mm3 for tablets for multiband operation is shown to demonstrate the feasibility. Results conclude that said small element can provide operation at two different frequency regions thanks to the proper excitation of the radiation modes in the ground plane; therefore said non-resonant element is referred as a ground plane booster. This fact opens a window to a new path in the antenna design, in which the antenna complexity is reduced to a small-multiband and very simple element easy to manufacture as surface mounted device (SMD) component and easy to integrate in emerging mobile platforms. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 58:1289–1294, 2016