Sony planned death of PSP UMD all along

It's not controversial to state that pretty much no one likes the PSP's UMD drive, but it might raise eyebrows to suggest that Sony itself was never that into the whole tiny optical disk concept.

That's the conclusion to be drawn from an interview given to Japanese website GameBusiness by Naoya Matsui, who heads up the Sony Computer Entertainment product planning division.

Planned all along

In it, he claimed that Sony always planned to release a handheld gamer, like the PSP Go, without a UMD drive.

"We'd planned to release a PSP model without a UMD drive since the very beginning," he's reported as saying.

No physical media

According to Matsui, Sony has been waiting for the electronic delivery mechanisms to mature sufficiently to make physical media redundant.

He explained: "We wanted to release it when the delivery of digital content was on par with the delivery of physical media. That's what we've been working on these past two years."

Whether Sony really did have the UMD's demise planned when the original PSP launched in 2004, we'll never really know, but come October's PSP Go launch, we'll definitely get a feel for life without those unloved little disks.