Chat Anywhere With the Sony Mylo

Take a PSP, smooth the edges a little, shrink it, add a sliding keyboard and raise the price -- and you've got something that looks like Sony's mylo, a personal communicator due to hit the shelves sometime next month.

Aimed at people who want to stay connected to the Web, IM and Skype but aren't particularly keen on always toting around laptops or paying service charges, the mylo seems, at first blush, to be ideal -- provided you always happen to find yourself around Wi-Fi hotspots and don't mind having your IM restricted to Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger and Skype. The 2.4'' LCD screen has a resolution of 320 x 240.

Also packed into the 5.3-oz. mylo are JPEG/PNG/BMP viewing, MP3/WMA/ATRAC audio playback, MPEG-4 video playback, and a Memory Stick Duo Pro slot. (The unit comes with 1 GB of memory, some of which is reserved by the system.)

So far so good, but -- why, Sony, why? -- the mylo's Wi-Fi capabilities are restricted to open 802.11b networks. Still, the mylo looks good on paper; let's see how it plays out in real life.