You might think I've gone bonkers. But bear with me here, I'm not kidding. A lucky find by my friend MaTiAz seems to point towards some form of VoIP functionality in upcoming firmwares. This reference to Skype is hidden in the decrypted version of vshmain.prx from Firmware 3.10, basically the latest firmware if you don't count 3.11. Nobody has yet checked the presence of its reference in the latest firmware (3.11) but it's most probably there since not much has changed between the two firmwares.

Anyways, I did get a look at the decrypted version of the prx and as expected, this string pointing to a non-existing prx was present. To save you guys the hassle of having to do it yourselves, I've taken a screenshot which shows the same. If you're interested in finding it yourself, the reference is present as a string at offset 0x000344C4 in the decrypted vshmain.prx.

Checking the dump, there was no actual PRX by that name which means that the actual functionality is still being worked upon at this stage. And I don't think anyone's bluffing either. There have already been cases of Camera, GPS, and POPS PRXes being in the firmware long before the functionality was opened up. In the case of Camera and GPS, references can be found as far back as Firmware 2.70. POPS references were found in Firmware 2.80 dumps.

While this is all good to hear, the question begs to be asked - "What happens to the Sony Mylo?" You know, the PSP's sibling which came out a while ago with features like VoIP and Google Talk support. Is Sony thinking of burying the Mylo and making the PSP into "a lot more than a handheld" whose main functionality until now has been gaming? After all, the Mylo never quite took off in the same manner as the PSP, which itself has been lagging far behind the DS. We don't have any figures to back us here, but the Mylo was, in my opinion, a complete failure.

So while killing off the Mylo might not sound so good, it's probably a good move by Sony to move over a lot of its functionality to the PSP which still has a firm ground to stand on with over a few million users. It's all speculation since Sony hasn't announced anything yet, but then again, would you expect an official announcement from Sony about this?

The hardware in the PSP is good enough to handle the extra additions and the feature set of the Mylo was pretty much a subset of what you found on the PSP, plus a few additions. As for the firmware features, my opinion is that you should see some of the Skype functionality coming out in Firmware 3.50 or thereabouts. This would give Sony at least a couple of months to fine-tune everything and integrate it with the rest of the stuff already there. Stay tuned, we will have the latest on this as soon as we know more! A big thanks to MaTiAz for telling me about this find!