DVD, Mini DVD, UMD, Blu-ray, HD-DVD… The list goes on as media becomes faster, bigger, and better than ever. As new forms of media become available for consumers, many people eager to have the latest in technology quickly adapt to these new mediums. Of course, with all the new upgrades, we have to begin to think up ways of making everyday gadgets work with these new formats to maximize our efficiency.

So that got me thinking about the PSP, and how we could incorporate these new mediums to make the PSP the best portable on the market. The PSP is already the most powerful handheld on the market due to its superior video playback, graphical capabilities, and its massive 4:3 inch screen. So then why do people still believe that the PSP lacks the hardware needed to make a flawless handheld video game system? The notion most likely comes from the features that separate the PSP from delivering upon its true next gen qualities.

First of all, the PSP suffers from load time issues when dealing with RPG games, graphically powerful games, or just poorly developed games. With the release of the PSP Slim the use of the PSP’s internal memory cache system allows the Slim PSP to decrease loading times, but unfortunately, is still lacking what people define as “next-gen” load times. Not to mention that Sony is still concentrating on making UMD movies, which are, and always will be, a dead breed of medium for movies and music.

Loading times for Crisis Core in the Old PSP was around 5-10 seconds.

The only true way to make people want to buy UMD Movies or use the UMD as their main format is to go next-gen. This would mean, as an example, using Blu-ray for the PSP since, after all, it is Sony’s lead format. If Sony makes the next medium for the PSP a Mini Blu-ray, then disc capacity will increase, a higher definition of video would be displayed, and best of all, people will be able to load them up in other Blu-ray compatible drives.

To be more specific, capacity would increase from 1.8 GB to 7.5 GB, allowing for more content to be written to each disc. A problem that could potentially arise would be backward compatibility, which could be easily resolved by allowing PSP users to convert their old UMD’s into a PSP2 readable format, which the PSN Store currently uses for their own PSP downloadable games.

With the advent of the next generation disc formats, whether it be Blu-ray or HD-DVD, Sony can truly crush their handheld competition and dominate the sales market once again.