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Given the name of this site, and the recent release of the PSP Slim / Slim & Lite / PSP-2000 (delete as appropriate), it seems appropriate to spend some time reviewing the UMD related changes of Sony's revamped portable device.
First and foremost, physically the UMD bay has changed from a spring loaded eject type affair, to something requiring fingernails to pry open. It's certainly more elegant, but without the reassuring clunk-click that PSP users have become used when loading up a new UMD.
Now that the UMD eject button has become obsolete, it has been replaced with the Wi-Fi WLAN switch which previously resided on the left hand side of the PSP-1000.
Of course, this could all be academic to a fair percentage of you who seemingly enjoy the latest Sony PSP releases without having to go near a UMD, much less operate the UMD loading mechanism.
The second major UMD-related change is concerned with loading times. The PSP just cannot compete with the access times of Flash-based media, not to mention the battery draining power that spinning the UMD requires to operate. On the PSP Slim however, there have been some attempts to bridge at least part of this gap with a new system setting entitled UMD Cache. Making full use of the 64MB of RAM the PSP Slim ships with (versus the incumbents 32MB) this allows UMD content to be stored on memory which is quicker to access than optical media (aka UMD), supposedly making games faster.
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