Analysts Michael Pachter of Wedbush Securities and Jesse Divnich of EEDAR wouldn’t be at all surprised if Sony’s next handheld supported the platform holder's proprietary UMD format.

While Sony opted to remove the previously ever-present UMD drive for the October release of its latest portable, PSPgo, developer talk on the Tokyo Game Show floor in late September was of the system’s next iteration, PSP-4000, which it is claimed will support the format when it launches in 2010.

“I think it is possible and likely that the PSP-4000 will support UMD, and I think that Sony will support whichever formats make it the most money,” Pachter told us.

“It’s an interesting dilemma," he added. "Without question, there is room for packaged products and the benefits of digital-only are probably more than offset by foregone sales of UMDs. I think that the next version will likely have both, with a disc drive that uses no power if the user is playing a downloaded game. The question is whether it’s too bulky, but my guess is that they can fit some flash in there, or equip the game with a 16Gb memory stick and consumers will be perfectly happy."

Divnich suggested that Sony would like to drop its commitment to UMD, but that financially this may not be possible.

“Ultimately, businesses must meet the demand of consumers. If the PSPgo fails to latch on as a standard model for the PSP, Sony has no choice but to continue to support the UMD format. If Sony had their way, they would eradicate the UMD standard in favour of digital distribution. Sony’s primary goal with the UMD format was for it to catch on in other media players, unfortunately it didn’t. 

“Sony has had horrible luck when it comes to creating media standards,” he added, noting that the likes of Betamax, Sony Dynamic Digital Sound and MiniDisc were all “formats that failed to gain mass popularity, even though they were formats that provided superior technology to the current standard”.

According to Divnich, PSPgo “is three years ahead of its time, the same way the PS3 was ahead of its time”, and “regardless of the success of the PSPgo, ten years from now when the industry is mostly digital, we will look back and single out Sony and its PSPgo as being the first console to push us in the digital direction.”

Picture credit: Crunch Gear