10 Biggest PlayStation Fails Sony Wants You To Forget

5. The Whole UMD Thing

Bless Sony and their obsession with the MiniDisc format. They struggled for so long to accept the fact that people just weren't interested. It was worth giving it a go as an audio format back in the 90s though, as the MiniDisc held a few (bot not enough) advantages over CDs, such as the ability to move tracks around an album and have more editing control over your on-disc musical content. But what Sony was thinking when it made UMD (an evolution of the MiniDisc) the main media format for the PSP is anyone's guess. These things were dreadful, blighting the otherwise excellent PSP with long loading times and speedy battery drains that crippled the console. Sony touted UMD as being destined to one day become (true to its name) a 'universal' media format, present in every computer, games console and media player on the planet, but evidently that never came to fruition. The irony of the whole UMD mess is that Flash memory was already commonplace at the time the PSP was released, and a much more viable means of storing data. Sony would go on to use Flash memory in the PS Vita, but by this point no one was paying attention to Sony's brave but futile ventures into handheld gaming.