Sony Mylo

~ the eulogy ~

the mylo, short for "my life online," was a sony pocket communicator with a slide-out qwerty keyboard. it ran qtopia linux, had a 2.4 inch screen, and connected only over wifi. there was no cellular radio. the assumption was that you would be at home or inside a t-mobile hotspot whenever you wanted to use it. sony shipped the com-1 on september 15, 2006 in the united states for $349. it was marketed at the 18 to 24 age demographic, which mostly meant american college students with a parent who paid for t-mobile.

the software stack was actually interesting for 2006. skype and google talk came preinstalled. you could make a voip call over a coffee shop wifi network. the device also had a real browser, an rss reader, and a memory stick slot. the com-2 in february 2008 added a 3.5 inch touchscreen and a 1.3 megapixel camera. for one short period in early 2008 the mylo looked like a credible portable internet device.

then the iphone arrived. the original iphone shipped june 29, 2007, ten months after the com-1, and the iphone 3g shipped july 2008, four months after the com-2. the mylo was suddenly competing not with other devices but with a phone, which the kind of person who would have bought a mylo already owned. by late 2008 sony was clearing com-2 inventory at $199. by 2010 the device was gone from the catalog, and the free wayport hotspot access that shipped with the com-2 expired december 31 of that year, which is the cleanest stake to put in the ground as the death date.

i was twenty two in 2006 and at university in ankara, doing computer engineering coursework on a desktop pc at home with ttnet adsl, plus the lab machines on campus. wifi in turkey in 2006 meant the home router and occasionally a starbucks branch in istanbul. there was no national hotspot network you could lean on. a $349 wifi-only device that assumed you lived near a t-mobile retail store would not have worked here even if anyone had imported it. the mylo's whole premise was a usa with carrier-owned coffee shop wifi, and that premise was thin even there. it never reached turkey at all.

~ the dossier ~

~ the wayport problem ~

the com-2 came bundled with free access to over ten thousand wayport locations through december 31, 2010. wayport was the largest hotspot operator in the us at the time. over nine thousand of those locations were mcdonalds restaurants. so the actual lived-experience promise of the mylo was: take this $300 device to mcdonalds and chat for free. that was the entire long range internet story. when wayport got acquired by at&t in 2008 and the free access window started counting down, the entire value proposition of owning a com-2 also started counting down. sony did not extend the deal.

~ what sony was trying to invent ~

the mylo was sony trying to invent the pocket internet device a year before apple did it. they shipped first and got most of the bets wrong. they bet on wifi at a moment when consumer wifi outside the home was still rare. apple bet on cellular at a moment when 3g was about to become ubiquitous in the us. sony chose the strictly worse bet, and the mylo is what that bet looked like after four years on the market.

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