Apparently, if we are to believe those evil, evil hacker-type people, the latest PSP updates contains clues to the death of the much-maligned UMD format. It also breathes life into the the much-vaunted desire to run official games from memory stick and also for the PSP Store.

The ISO loading codecs within the recent updates indicate that official games can be loaded from USB memory sticks (doing so previously had invalidated warranties left, right and centre). This, in turn, could see a UMD'less PlayStation Portable (A.K.A. the PSP-Lite).

As interesting is the fact that this supports SCEA president Jack Tretton's demand for PSP downloadables via a specific store, as reported by SPOnG on May 17th this year. We quoted Tretton saying, "I think the advent of a long awaited and quite frankly long overdue ability to deliver a downloadable service for the PSP will help us out a great deal. Hopefully we'll have it out there by the fall."