If you've already dropped $299 on a second-gen mylo COM-2 unit, then Sony has a little treat for you -- while all of you early adopters still poking around on an original mylo probably feel pretty silly right now. Sony is launching the "mylo labs" site for nabbing mylo widgets, and while right now there are just a few Sony-built widgets, Sony will open up the site to developers in March to add their own. Widgets seem to be a natural fit for a device like this, and hey, they're free, so there's really no reason not to love. It's just too bad those gen-one types get left out in the cold.

[Via pocketables]

All five of you who have been waiting patiently for Sony to upgrade its mylo Personal Communicator should be pleased to learn that the revised internet tablet has finally gone on sale at SonyStyle. With its high-res 3.5-inch touchscreen, 1GB of storage, and improved Flash support, the $299 mylo 2 does indeed offer a number of attractive feature bumps over its predecessor -- however, we're still a little wary of how Sony's positioned this product in the market. But hey, what do we know: apparently they pushed enough first-gen units out the door to give this restyled number a shot. Starts shipping on the 28th, in either white or black, says Sony.

[Thanks, Michael E]

If you're a mylo fan, you're pretty stoked right now. We're doing our best to refrain from calling this thing the mylo 2 (namely because it's just the new "mylo," official designation COM-2 mylo), but we did get to kick the tires on it, and it's pretty clear how huge an improvement the new model really is. Unfortunately, that's not saying a whole lot, given the state of the original mylo -- but the new one? Really not so bad. Granted, the crisp, high res touchscreen wasn't quite sensitive enough for our taste, and it didn't really seem intended for use with a stylus, and most of the big new features we tested (RSS / podcast aggregation, YouTube playback, browsing heavy sites like Engadget, etc.) worked, but were pretty sluggish. For our money, between the two we'd say pick up an N810, but if you're down with the mylo this is a formidable upgrade.

The mylo is back, and this time it's gotten serious. The once humble, even kind of laughable device has been upgraded with specs respectable enough to make former naysayers sit up and take notice. Check it out:

• 800 x 480 3.5-inch (resistive) touchscreen display!
• 1GB internal storage, mini-USB
  
• 1.3 megapixel camera, 802.11b/g, colored info-LEDs
  
• WMA / PlaysForSure DRM, MP3, AAC, ATRAC, and MPEG-4 codec support
• Flash Lite 3 (capable of playing back YouTube videos, for example)
• Netfront-based browser, AIM / Gtalk / Yahoo IM support
• Skype support, podcast and RSS aggregator (!), and an expandable widget panel with access to Google, YouTube, Facebook and other web 2.0 sites
  
• Attachable face plates ($20) and cradle ($30) options
• Free Wayport WiFi access at your local participating McDonald's until December 31, 2010
• 5.1 x 2.5 x 0.8-inch footprint

Unfortunately you still can't add your own apps to the device, making it far less compelling then, say, the similar but far better equipped Nokia N810 -- which goes for $180 more. It's shipping this month for $300, "BS" key included for no additional charge.

So we were doing some followup research on yesterday's post about the upcoming mylo 2 Personal Communicator, when we happened to stumble upon the picture you see above, first posted in the beginning of October by qj.net. Part of an article sourcing someone claimed to be "close to Sony." this supposed mockup of the second-generation mylo immediately struck us as having an almost identical form factor to the FCC render that we just saw. And sure enough, as you can see after the break, a little resizing magic does indeed show the two outlines lining up pretty closely -- although not perfectly. Hmm...if this is in fact the production version of the mylo 2, what does that PlayStation-style typeface on the keyboard say about the device's features, we wonder?

[Image courtesy of qj.net]

Well hello there, never-before-seen-device bearing the mylo name, nice to meet you. We can only assume by your camera-equipped backside (and your designation as the "COM-2") that you're the mylo 2 we'd heard rumors about -- but no thanks to the tight-lipped FCC, we don't know much more than the fact that you'll be one-upping your predecessor by tacking 802.11g onto its b. Still, now that we've got you in our sights, the rest of your specs can't remain secret for long.

While you may have given Sony's hard-to-categorize mylo little chance at surviving in the market, a recent report seems to show that sales were "exactly as Sony expected," which possibly means that there's more where that came from. Although surveyed retailers expressed mixed results in regard to sales, Sony "considers the mylo the forerunner to a new category of devices that cater to kids who want to replicate their PC online experience in a portable," and reportedly mentioned that the "next-generation model would include new partners and expanded capability." Now, we're not sure if WWAN or WiMAX connectivity could be headed to the not-yet-confirmed mylo 2, but it's pretty safe to assume that competition in the converged device market will have heated up quite intensely for the second iteration.

[Thanks, Ryan]