Due to the emergence of Internet and embedded computing, humans will be more and more faced to an increasing intrusion of computing in their day-to-day life by what it is called now smart devices. Agent characteristics like pro-activeness, autonomy and sociability and the inherent distributed nature of multi-agent systems make them a promising tool to use in the smart devices applications. This paper tries to illustrate the benefits of using multi-agent systems on smart communicating objects and discusses the need of using multi-agent platforms. We then present an overview of multi-agent platforms created for use on small devices (i.e. devices with limited computing power) and for each reviewed multi-agent platform we try to identify what are its main characteristics and architectural concepts.