Sony has been pushing the mylo product line since 2001, and Sascha at PCMag has the lowdown on their newest addition. The mylo is a mobile instant messenger device that doubles as a Skype phone, web appliance, and media player. Sony is dubbing the mylo as a way to take advantage of open hotspots for those who use instant messaging as their primary form of communication.

In no way is the mylo a cell phone. There’s no cell modem, and it needs a hotspot to be useful. Luckily, JiWire’s services are built into the handheld so locating hotspots in a metro area should be a piece of cake.

Google Talk, Skype, and Yahoo Messenger are all supported, but curiously there's no AIM or MSN. A redeeming feature is that the mylo runs a mobile version of the Opera web browser; a browser which I fanatically support. Web support is full HTML, and there are several display and scaling modes to help fit big pages to a small screen.

The device ships with a paltry one megabyte gigabyte of onboard memory, and expansion is provided with Sony’s Memory Stick Duo. In a strange twist of a retro feature set the device also supports .txt file editing, so it can double as a mobile emergency essay machine.

Haha - Thanks to Jennifer Chase for pointing out that I misread the spec sheet.