Nintendo has shipped more the 2m DS handheld consoles in the US and Japan, the company said yesterday.

With over 1m sold in each territory, Nintendo is well on the way to meeting its end-of-year sales target of 2.8m units worldwide.

The DS launched in the US on 21 November then in Japan on 2 December. In the US, it took a week for 500,000 DS consoles to be sold - in Japan that figure was passed in just four days.

Nintendo restated its plan (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/25/nintendo_ds_europe/) to launch the console in Europe early next year, though the machine isn't expected to ship over here until late in Q1 2005 (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/05/25/nintendo_sony_euro_launch/), around the time Sony's PlayStation Portable (PSPs) makes its European and North American debuts (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/02/sony_psp_euro_rollout/).

And that's really what all this shouting about numbers (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/01/nintendo_ds_sales/) is about. Sony has sold over 200,000 PSPs in Japan since the handheld console's 12 December debut, as it struggles to boost production and meet its own end-of-year target of 500,000 units.

Nintendo clearly wants World+Dog to assume that its higher sales figures represent higher popularity. That may yet prove to be the case, but while sales of the PSP and even, to an extent, the DS are being controlled by supply, not demand, it's impossible to say so now with certainty. ®

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