Speaking in a recent interview, Sony product planning division lead Naoya Matsui, had revealed that it was always Sony’s intention to remove the UMD drive from their PSP.
“We’d planned to release a PSP model without a UMD drive since the very beginning,” said Matsui. Going on, he stated, “But if we’d simply released the hardware, there wouldn’t have been much for everyone to enjoy. We needed to prepare the right environment for it first – things like the transferral of content with the PS3 and PSN, and PC software to manage content like music and movies such as Media Go.”
Essentially, Sony had to wait for digital downloads to come up to par with physical media, and they feel the time is right. The PSP Go] is set to hit stores shelves October 1st.
[Source]
