An unsurprisingly chuffed Sony this morning announced it sold 980,000 PlayStation 2s in Japan over the weekend - just 20,000 units shy of its one million-machine target. What's 20,000 units among friends? Quite a lot really, especially when a good proportion of the total number of machines sold hasn't actually shipped yet. Sony was forced to admit that while it took 380,000 orders over the Net, only 120,000 customers - less than one third of the total -received their console. The reason: we're ten days behind schedule on production, Sony confessed to Reuters, thanks to a shortage of memory cards. Still, like movie opening weekend numbers, the initial sales of the PlayStation 2 are less important than the console's performance over the coming months. Sony is now predicting it will have shipped 1.4 million PlayStation 2s by the end of March, down on its original prediction of 1.5 million. Given the high level of as yet unfulfilled orders, Sony is going to have to work very hard to catch up. However, Sony presumably believes it is still on course to ship six million consoles between the start of April and the end of the year. ®