iPhone beats Wii, DS, PSP: 'fastest hardware growth in consumer tech history'

People are buying the iPhone because it's a good phone with a lot of great features, gaming just happens to be one of them. People buy the iPod touch because it's a great MP3 player with the same appealing features. They're not buying them simply to play games on them.

It'd be like putting the PSP in a chart with other MP3 players and saying "Still don't think the PSP is a real MP3 player?" That's not what customers are buying them for.

Just like the first comment above says, the iPhone is a phone first, and a whatever-the-hell-you-use-it-for second. It's NOT a serious gaming platform.

If the PSPgo was a phone, it would be pretty damn sweet. I had a chance to compare my iPhone to a go last week and they're very close in size.

The big argument is, would you rather play high quality games and fumble to browse the internet or easily browse the internet and fumble with the games?

Of course that's all hypothetical.

Didn't realize this was relevant news. You're comparing the combined sales of a high end phone and a high end portable media player to the individual sales of a couple of handheld gaming systems that have been around for quite a while at this point.

Gotta love this top notch, flame bait reporting Joystiq. Ad revenue +1

Have you seen this new-fangled radio box? The dang thing lets you hear music and voices without leaving your home! Plus, it's freakin' huge! ITS THE FASTEST SELLING TABLE EVER!!

not even a fair comparision....as everyone else has said....apples and oranges....I have an iPhone...damn if I play games on it like that so fuck what the chart says....why even put the Wii in there at all?? whats the purpose? Further skewing the chart is what its doing. Phone/MP3 Player vs a Gaming system/Handheld?? how much sense does that make??

I love how the chart is biased toward Apple. Why not throw the DSLite and DSi with their respective "since launch" sales on that chart as well as the PSP2000, PSP3000 and PSP Go in there as well and see how great the iPhone+iPod Touch look. Nice work, doubling up effort on two different products to try and look good.

Besides, the whole momentum thing is bogus. Developers don't care what your momentum looks like, just what can be sold on it NOW and what total sales projections look like at the point a game will be done if development is started today. Those numbers still favor the DS.

I agree with this report not being all that accurate since it doesn't prove people buy the apple products specifically for gaming. But on another note, where do people get the idea to call it the iTouch? It's name is the iPod Touch! That drives me crazy T_T

So Wow. I think it's pretty safe to say, judging by the unanimous responses of the Joystiq Bio-mass, that this post is completely irrelevant now. I've never seen so much unification on here before!

If it were a gaming platform first and foremost, this might be meaningful. But it's not; it's a phone. And most people who get it are not going to use it primarily as a game platform, so despite fast growth, the iPhone doesn't have the numbers that matter to make it a viable contender against DS or PSP.

Aside from that, DS and PSP are platforms that won't change specs constantly, which makes them a stable environment for developers to work with. Apple releases new hardware every year, so how will games be able to take advantage of the new power and still remain backward compatible?

The phone as a true portable gaming platform that can compete with the big boys just isn't happening yet.

This is crazy. People don't buy the iPhone because it plays games, they buy it because it's a PHONE.

The research and chart have nothing to do with gaming. It just shows how fast people bought the iphone compared to other popular consumer electronics. The gaming comment was made by a separate person (David Cole) and Joystiq connected the two for some reason (slow news day).

The research is valid (people buy lots of iphones), but all that has to do with gaming is provide *potential* for a large install base for a gaming platform. Which, in my mind and in the minds of many posters here apparently, is quite the dubious claim (no buttons!)

Once again, I really think we need to be able to downvote actual posts and not just comments.

Actually, this is a pretty great graph. If you combine the numbers for the DS and the PSP you get a new headline:

DS+PSP beats iPhone: better luck next year Apple!

Regardless of if this graph is relevant or not, it is still damn impressive. The amount of units sold per period of time is astounding.

Guesstimation from the graph that it is 58 million sold in a little less than 9 quarters, that comes out to almost one iPod sold every second.

my wife has 2 ds units and quite a few games, she was a ds maniac until I got her the iTouch last year for xmas. she only plays animal crosssing each day - long enough to water flowers and keep people from moving, she hates it. I laugh at her misery.

She says she loves the iTouch ALOT more than the ds, and I believe her.

If only the Go had gone ahead and jumped a gen, even just adding touchscreen and slight hardware boost.......because I still want buttons and at least one analog stick. And I want videos and music...and a browser

Well, Nintendo and Sony don't release a new hardware edition EVERY YEAR, that includes minor updates like a slightly faster processor.

Apple only compares sales- it really needs to stop considering it sell a gaming hardware company. They JUST got COD4 on the MAC- lolz.

yeah, well it's a cell phone. Way more people use cell phones over a hand held console.

yeah, well it's a cell phone. Way more people use cell phones over a hand held console.

There are several indicators that should yell fowel here...

1) The iPhone and iPod Touch are not the same device, the are actually two compleatly seperate device, and not all features/apps are compatible between systems.

2) The average iPhone/iPod Touch apps cost a few dollars at most, vs the game systems which cost far more.

3) Why are devices like the iPod and Blackberry being compared on a chart which is comparing adoption rates while other devices had higher adoption rates than them which would be comparable with the other higher adoption rate devices, e.g. 360 and PS3.

Devices sold... that’s a joke...

The iPhone has moved around 34-35m units so far barely above the PSP, meaning the iPod Touch has sold approximately the same number of units, again not really competing in the market adoption rate in comparison to the similar devices, the PSP and DS, since they left out the 360 and PS3 who knows why the Wii was included, other than the fact that they want to claim the top spot for adoption rates with their flimsy numbers.

Of course it being an ipod has nothing to do with it, because its primarily a gaming device of course.

Wait, you mean to tell me I can call people on my iPhone? I can do more than just play games on it?

That's not what the genius at the Apple store told me, they just told me about all the great games, so I bought it. I had no idea it was actually a phone.

I have an iPod. I have games on it. Those games include a spelling game, a crossword game and a paper toss game.

That is not a gaming platform. That is a distraction, which is what I use it for.

Leave the charts for the bean counters. As has already been stated, this is a lame comparison. Take a poll and find out exactly how many iPhone users signed up for a 2 year contract and a $75 per month fee to play games as there primary use for the iPhone. Sure some of them play games with it, but that is not what they bought it for. The PSP, DS, Wii, etc all, were designed as game machines first and foremost.

If you polled the iPhone and iPod touch users, you would see much smaller numbers.

Stupid comparison.

It is a real gaming platform; it's just a terrible one.

Now if only they could multitask

If you actually get all those millions of iPhone users to regularly and consistently pay over 30-60$ for a single app....I'll call it a gaming platform.

For now its a simple smartphone for simple people on a horrible network.......with TONS of shovelware

Is it called iGame? No. Its a phone with a bunch of shiny fancy crap on it for the tech obsessed and trend obsessed consumers that need a million gadgets to make themselves feel important. Stop trying to convince us of its legitimacy because you're obsessed with digital downloading.

"Still think it's not a game player?"

No. Not until the system has a proper joypad / Steve Jobs stops sampling his own farts from a champagne glass. I've played games on this device, and with the lone exception of Rolando, they're uniformly terrible; the victims of Apple's lax quality control and the system's lack of a proper input device.

Besides, comparing the iPhone to a handheld game system isn't an apples to oranges comparison... it's more like apples to fire hydrants. The two devices are entirely different in both scope and application. I have the iPhone's baby brother, the iPod Touch, and while it does a lot of things well, video games are not and never will be one of them. Music player? Best one I've ever had. Internet browser? Incredible for its size. Game system? Hardly.

This reminds me of the hype surrounding cell phone games several years ago. Analysts were making the same predictions about them becoming a cash cow industry on the brink of eclipsing handheld gaming, but it didn't happen. Why? Because after the novelty wore off, people realized what they'll eventually realize about iPhone games... they have no lasting replay value.

Where are Nokia mobile phones in this graph? I like playing Snake on my Nokia from time to time