They're figures for the US market and they're just preliminary findings, but it's looking like Nintendo's Wii and Sony's PlayStation 3 were both outsold by Microsoft's year-old Xbox 360 this Christmas - but only just.

The numbers come from US retail market watcher NPD by way of a CNBC video report. According to the research firm, around 2m Xbox 360s were sold between the start of November 2006 and Christmas Day. Nintendo's Wii total was 1.8m units, a very good figure given the machine didn't launch in the US until 19 November, giving the Xbox 360 a head-start of almost three weeks.

Sony sold around 750,000 PS3s during the same period - less than half the amount of Wiis picked up during the key consumer sales period.

In November 2006, some 511,000 Xbox 360s, 476,000 Wiis and 197,000 PS3s were sold, according to NPD numbers published last year. None of the manufacturers managed to sell three times as many consoles in December as they did during the previous month, but Microsoft came the closest, followed by Sony and Nintendo. ®