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The UMD (universal media disc) is essentially dead and Sony is in trouble with their PS3. Not surprisingly Sony is still trying to hang onto the Memory Stick, proprietary format as well as their Connect music store and ATRAC 3 DRM music file format. Though the company never seems to learn from its mistakes or even offer a slight reason to love them, we still do.

Sony is now trying to push the Memory Stick format by, bundling films with its latest memory stick packages. They will only play on the PSP (I expect that their is an easy hack to get these to play on your PC as well), leading us to believe that Sony may ditch the UMD drive altogether with the next version of the PSP. Now that movies are coming preloaded on memory sticks, games can be loaded and played off of the cards as well, and it is known that the optical UMD drive takes up valuable battery life…why not just ditch the format. The empty space can either be put to a larger battery and/or an internal memory source, preferably solid state flash memory around 8-10 GB.

The first selection of movies-on-a-stick are XXX: State of the Union, SWAT, The Grudge and Hitch. The sticks are, of course, reusable and can also hold games, photos or music. On sale now, the packages are available for $60 and $100 for 1GB and 2 GB, respectively.

Read [Sony]