Posted on October 29, 2010, Phil Owen Word is the PSP2 Will Be UMD-Free and Super Powerful
No, thank you
The PSP2 is the rumor that won’t go away, and I’m pretty much convinced at this point that it absolutely does exist. Too many people keep talking about it, and today we get more info, this time courtesy of Kotaku.
They’ve got two items they say they’ve heard that they’ve “confirmed” with their “sources” that the PSP2 will not have a UMD drive, and Sony hasn’t yet figured out what storage method to use, which lines up with what Eurogamer said back in August.
If Kotaku’s second item is to be believed, the abandonment of the UMD should not be surprising at all. They say the PSP will have 1gb of RAM, which is 20 times that of the PSP and twice that of, you know, the Xbox 360. With that much RAM and what one could reasonably assume would be as powerful a processor as they could fit in a handheld, it may be that it’s impossible for Sony to put on the thing any sort of disc drive that could hold the games built for it. So far no one has even really implied that the unit will be download-only for games, and it could be that they’re looking at, say, delivering games on a proprietary memory card format like the MemoryStick Duo or something new, which have much higher capacities than any disc-based media small enough to fit in a handheld.
Or maybe it’ll end up being download only and we’ll all frown. I’m just guessing here.