With the European arrival of the a scant few days away you would expect representatives to talk up the machine. Yet you may consider that Phil Harrison, Executive VP of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, has overcooked his comments to trade magazine MCV. Not only does he dismiss the undisputed kings of the hand-held market since its inception out of hand, he labels the top-selling as nothing more than a gimmick:

"The idea of a handheld rivalry with is an irrelevance. Those formats don't appear in our planning. It's not a fair comparison; not fair on them, I should stress. That sounds arrogant, maybe, but it's the truth. Nintendo knows its target audience, because it has really narrowed that down; and it's pretty much defined by a boy or girl's ability to admire Pokemon."

"With the DS, it's fair to say that Nintendo stepped out of the technical race and went for a feature differentiation with the touch screen," Harrison continued. "But I fear that it won't have a lasting impact beyond that of a gimmick. so the long-lasting appeal of the platform is at peril as a direct result of that."

You have to wonder why Mr Harrison would make such comments, particularly as the DS has outsold the PSP in every region so far, although the PSP is catching up with the DS in the US. A study of 1000 PSP owners in also brings into question the long-term future of the PSP, with 50% of them freely admitting that they hadn't touched their PSP 'in some time', as they wait for interesting new games to appear. More as we get it.

By Sam Gibson