Next-gen PSP to kill UMD?

While it may not be attracting as much attention as the Apple iPhone did, the next iteration of the Sony PSP has been up for a lot of speculative talk. We’ve heard that the PSP2 (as some are calling it) may rock 8GB of Flash memory, some sort of camera, and maybe even a 60GB hard drive from Samsung. With all of this extra storage, what will happen to Sony’s much-aligned UMD format? More specifically, why would you buy a UMD movie when you can load it onto the internal hard drive?

They have to give a certain respect to backwards compatibility, though, just as they let you play PS1 games on the PS2, and the (some) PS2 games on the new PlayStation 3. As such, even if new PSP games do not require a physical UMD, you would think that they’d still include a UMD slot to let you enjoy “legacy” games, right?

Still a whole bunch of internet hearsay, and just as “expert predictions” of the iPhone weren’t exactly bang on, we can’t expect the PSP2 to be exactly what we’ve been hearing either.