iPhone v PSP v DS: Q4 2008 in numbers

With Sony and Nintendo announcing their financial results earlier this week, and Apple the week before, there's an interesting comparison to be made between sales of their respective handheld gaming devices.

So, Nintendo sold 11.9 million DS units in Q4 2008, while Sony sold 5.08 million PSPs. That's a fairly simple comparison to make, with The Big N coming out way on top.

And Apple? That's where it gets a bit more complicated. Apple sold 4.3 million iPhones in Q4 2008, and 22 million iPods. The trouble is, we don't know how many of the latter were iPod touch devices, as opposed to traditional iPods, Nanos or Shuffles.

It's an important stat to be missing, because Apple heavily pushed the iPod touch's gaming features in its pre-Christmas marketing campaigns.

How many people who bought an iPhone or an iPod touch will use it to play games on, though? Here's where we can patch in some just-released research from comScore, which says 32.4 per cent of US iPhone users downloaded a game during November last year.

In other words, Q4 probably saw around 1.4 million new iPhone users who are likely to play games (that's 32.4 per cent of 4.3 million), as compared to 5.08 million new PSP owners and 11.9 million new DS owners.

Except there's an unidentified number of iPod touch gamers to add into Apple's figure, while it's unclear how many of those PSP and DS sales were upgrades for people with older versions of the handhelds.

But still, them's the numbers.