They're not popular anymore?

I watched movies go from VHS, to DVDs , and Sony was at the forefront of all the media changes. So I was sold on the umd format.

I remember being so jealous at my one friend who owned like The Matrix on umd.

UMD movies made perfect sense. It's not like the machine took mini-DVDs, and back then, watching anything on a mobile screen felt futuristic. Competing options included movies on Game Boy Advance cartridges and black-and-white Spongbob episodes on VideoNow CDs.

Warner did try the sensible thing - whole movies on mini-DVDs, which could play on mobile or home players. But they were so fundamentally dysfunctional that every movie came split across two discs. Not two-sided! Separate easily-scratched discs! Like you're gonna juggle that, in your pockets, halfway through Catwoman.

Where Sony fucked PSP users was on Memory Sticks. They took their price-gouging proprietary format, and made a special version you had to buy new. Oh were you already in the Sony ecosystem, for cameras and phones? Fuck you, buy it again. Then they released a newer PSP model and it took an even special-er version, so if you upgraded, you got zero benefit. I mean at least your games would play, until they released another PSP with no optical drive, and you bet your ass that took yet another extra-proprietary flash media format.

The wildest thing is - they weren't fighting bootlegs. There were no bootleg Memory Sticks. The DRM was not cracked until like 2020. Sony played these fuck-fuck games purely because they could. And it must have chased off a lot of early adopters who glanced at the DS line's simple backwards compatibility and thought Spirit Tracks looked fun.

Both

Soon enough we'll be far enough along to go back to the future of Back to the Future 2.

Their recent song Whom Will you Follow is a callback to that original sound and is full on nostalgia.

PSP graphics are pretty good tho, DS is a lot crunchier on that front.

with the most shitass graphics and games

Man what, the PSP was the most advanced handheld of its time. The DS had a worse screen and was much weaker but got away with it because games were really simple visually. PSP games look great.

My homebrewed PSP was my laptop before I had a laptop. It was an amazingly versatile device considering it's era!

I'm sorry but the PSP had a lot of great games. Jeanne D'Arc, Daxter, The Wipeout series, God of War, Metal Gear Peacwalker, Final Fantasy Tactics, loco roco, Crisis Core, Ys Seven, Mega Man Powered Up, Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep, Gran Turismo, Monster Hunter, etc.

Hmmm I feel both of them are pretty evenly matched. Both have a wealth of great and beautiful games, both have a nice design. I do think the DS is more iconic in the strictest sense. It has the zeitgeist of the gameboy behind it and has been in production longer in some form or another.

True, but it hasn't really innovated much. There's the foldable screen, but it mostly just looks the same.

Society runs on apps now. When I call my bank customer service, they tell me to install the app. Not having Instagram has been a career sacrifice. The last time I went to a concert, I told security my ticket was at will call and not on my phone, and he took my phone and installed Google wallet and connected my account to try to see my purchase history.

That's on me for letting an asshole take my phone, but the point is that life has become a constant battle to keep things simple.