Sony gives and takes on UMD -> Digital Copy program

PSP owners: Do you have a small collection of UMD’s? Looking forward to the PSP Go’s digital only approach? With any major change up such as the move from physical to a digital only distribution method comes two sides. One side is happy. One side is not. Ignoring whatever side you choose, if you thought you’d have a sure fire way to backup or copy over your previously purchased UMD movies to digital copies for your brand spankin’ new PSP Go will have some thumb twirling to do as you wait around for Sony and their partners to get their act together. According to Sony:

We were evaluating a UMD conversion program, but due to legal and technical reasons we will not be offering the program at this time

They do note however that they are actively working on a UMD trade-in program of sorts that would allow UMD owners to trade-in their physical copies for a digital. Hardly the solution many wanted, though better than nothing I guess.

Does it bother anyone how “our property” is becoming less ours and more of a “rental” from the manufacturer?

Gizmodo > Kotaku

Toshiba swallows pride, joins the cool kids club

It wasn’t that long ago that two electronics giants were duking it out for your dollar and world wide supremacy. The battle between Sony (Blue-ray) and Toshiba (HD-DVD) was fought out for many months in retail stores and estores across the world. In the end, Sony and Blue-ray won out. Naturally Toshiba was just a tad sour with their loss and initially announced that they had no plans to support Blue-ray. Though the good ‘ol boys in red are finally coming around to the Blue side. As they announced their intentions to join the Blue-ray Disc Association (BDA), today Toshiba announced that they have in fact finally applied for that BDA membership they talked about a couple months ago, bringing together two giants back into a somewhat harmonious relationship. Now that the world is back in one piece, expect Blue-ray adoption to more than likely increase albeit slowly still. Have you joined camp blue yet?

Source: Crunch Gear