Sony mylo2 Personal Communicator
Review by Robert Young-Pullman | Published April 2008 | Review Archives

As shown in the legendary film This is Spinal Tap, bands and artists on their last legs usually like to say they're "big in Japan". It sounds better than "dead everywhere else". Every few months, a fellow nerd shows me a new gadget that is so wacky that it must be big in Japan.

This is Sony's mylo2 (it's lower-case, which market research shows is more quirky and fun!), and the only good thing that can be said about it is that, yes, it's big in Japan, home of strange game shows and even stranger children's television shows. The mylo2 is about the size of a bulky cellphone. It uses wireless LAN technology that lets you drop into a local internet hotspot and leech off the access for free. This is the big selling point here: once you pay the pretty outlandish $300 price, you'll never have to pay another dollar again.

And that's about the best that can be said about the quirky and fun mylo2, because while it's the size of a cellphone... IT HAS NO PHONE! At a time when cellphones are becoming more like laptops, Sony has actually released a cellphone which has no phone. The company is trying to get around the general disaster this product has become by claiming that users can sign up for free internet Skype calls, but you can already do that with a laptop. Nearly everything this cellphone-sized-computer-without-a-cellphone can do, a laptop can do better and for not much more lucre. For that matter, nearly everything an iPhone can do, the mylo2 does a lot worse. Spend an extra few dollars to get an iPhone instead.