Wow, what an amazing week. There was 350K hardware sold in this one week which is really closer to what you'd expect around Christmas time. To get an idea just how amazing it is, consider this; This week last year Pokemon Emerald was released and sold 790K. This pushed GBA sales up to 68K. Now we have 3 handheld platforms each beating that figure. Also interesting was that in spite of the GBM release GBA SP sales went up, so it looks like the GBM may not totally cannibalise the GBA.
The two big stories for the week apart from the GBM are Tamagotchi and the psp. Tamagotchi has single handedly smashed the theory that the DS isn't good for 3rd parties. Chances are it will be bigger than any 3rd party psp game this year, and may even end up outselling Dynasty Warriors psp which was launched last year.
The other main story is the psp. Lets go back in time to March this year. The DS hit a low of 22K for a week(and the psp hounds were gleefully declaring it a dying system), the userbase stood at 1,925,141. The following week(March 21-27) saw the release of Kirby(75K) and two new colours. This saw DS sales shoot up to 55,825. Over the next 3 weeks DS sales declined again before Nintendogs hit and the DS went through the roof.
So look at the psp, last week it was at 22K with a userbase of 1,697,471 a fair bit behind where the DS was in March. However the one week comparison with WE9(107K), FF:AC and the new colour have shot weeky sales up to 70K which is actually better(increase of 320% compared to 250% for the DS in March). What this show is that there is definitely life in the psp. However there is still difficulty. The white version sold 48K and the black went up to 24K. This suggests the new colour had a significant effect and so declines over the next couple of weeks could be swift. However with 4 games coming this week and 5 the week after there is still a fighting chance. The big problem is that Winning Eleven is the biggest psp release all year. So this week and the next couple, this is it. If it can't keep making inroads then it'll have to be a push next year which may(should) be too late.