Hands-on with Sony's wireless LocationFree TV

We checked out Sony's new LocationFree Portable Broadband TV a couple of days ago at the big Home Entertainment Show that was going on here in New York last week (but we only have these bad photos to show for it since we forgot to bring our digicam and had to use our Treo 600 instead). You'll probably be sick of hearing about LocationFree in about four or five months when it comes out, but if you haven't heard of it, it's basically a wireless tablet with an LCD touchscreen that you can use to watch TV, or surf the web, do email, etc. The twist is that it comes with a wireless base station that you connect to your cable box or TiVo and that can stream your TV shows to you anywhere in the world over the Internet.

Part of the demonstration involved them streaming live TV from Japan to one of the LocationFree TVs. To get it to work over the Internet they have to obviously compress the signal (you can choose the level of compression depending on how fast your Internet connection is at home), but it does work. And you don't have to limit yourself to TV, either. If you have one of those multi-disc DVD changer carousels you can stream your entire movie collection to yourself. The first two LocationFree TVs will come in 12.1-inch and 7-inch versions and should be out in September.