Sony mylo wifi device packaged with Skype

Two big, related announcements are coming out tomorrow – MobileCrunch has the scoop. Sony announced its new mylo (“my life online”) personal communicator, a wifi device that works in any 802.11b wireless network. It allows instant messaging, internet browsing and emailing, as well as listening to music (MP3, ATRAC or WMA) and viewing photos and MPEG-4 videos. This thing is Skype enabled, and Skype is making a separate release on that functionality.

mylo has a 2.4 inch LCD screen (measured diagonally), 1 GB of flash memory and a slide out qwerty keyboard. You can have it in any color you want, as long as it’s black or white. Sony claims the battery will allow up to 45 hours of music playback or seven hours of chatting and web surfing.

It also comes pre-packaged with Skype, Google Talk and Yahoo Messenger and includes JiWire’s hotspot directory which lists 20,000 or so wifi networks in the U.S.

Look for it in September, cost will be $350.

This could be the wifi device for Skype that we’ve all been waiting for. I’m going to get one of these things as soon as it’s released, a black one, and I suspect I’ll use it constantly.