For those of you who are, like me, awaiting November with bated breath for Nintendo to relax their deathgrip on the North American release of the Opera browser for the Nintendo DS, there may be yet another toy to play with in the meantime.

K-Byte and Lite-On (yep, them) are now making an IM appliance that's about the size of a pager with a LCD screen that jumps on available nearby WiFi connections and runs an IM client that talks on Yahoo, AIM, or MSN's networks. I've no idea if they have plans to make it able to support Jabber or not (this would be a clincher for me), but they've apparently managed to get them on the shelves at both Target and Best Buy for about $100 apiece.

Very, very tempting.

Let the IM appliances begin launching!