yeah but it may get hard to keep up later

i hope it will tho 

What scares me is that the thing still hasn't seen a price drop, and yet its flying off the shelves.

Like you said, some museums and schools in Japan are using them as tour/learning devices, and Nintendo uses DS's at their baseball stadium (the Mariners I believe) to give the fans in the stadium real-time stats and such, of the game they are watching and other games as well (scores and such). I also heard that DisneyLand (or World...) was looking into using DS's to give visitors a interactive map, that provides line times, offline rides, and the likes.

I think it would be really neat to be able to use DS's in school. Hopefully when the US politicians get their heads out of their rears and start fixing No Child Left Behind, they'll actually smarten up and perhaps look at using them in school. I'm sure they could use that English Training game to help kids with English. And isn't there a Math Training too?

I think if the DS could hit it off as a non-gaming device in America as much as it has in Japan, it could easily pass the PS2 in sales. It'll be interesting to see if Nintendo trys to do this or not, though it seems like it's already happening with the likes of the baseball stat program thing, and the DisneyWorld/Land interactive map.

That and it could really use a price drop. 

Really impressive for the DS

 It has seen a price drop, It came out at $150 in the US and can now be bought for $130, with prices going below $100 for this last Christmas.

 Thanks for the correction. For some reason, I always thought it debuted at $130, and I haven't seen any places offer the Lite for under a hundred yet, or I might have traded in my phat.

Holy crow, so if Nintendos expecting a 2 million drop in sales for the DS, does that mean they have no intention of a price drop for 08.

So they may just Milk the DS till 2012, and release a new Portable. with a new Console?

So the price drop would probably be in 2009 to about 120 USD and 2011 to 99 USD.

That seems a bit too optimistic, but it's making sense.

 The PSP is also being used for non-gaming purposes. Not just the people I see just using it as a media player, but I've seen it being and used one at a museum as a tour device. It's not as common as the DS perhaps, but it happens too.

There's an enormous difference in how much use the PSP gets for non-gaming in Japan and how much use the DS gets. The DS actually has the edge over the PSP in that market, since it's easily understood and interacted with by new users, costs less than the PSP, and is more sturdy overall (which is really important for equipment being lent to tourists; you would not believe the damage people inflict on items they don't own, by accident and on purpose alike).

That fact is interesting because the PSP is marketed as more than just a gaming device, with it's multimedia capabilities, yet the DS seems to be used in by more people as a non-gaming device (with perhaps a little Nintendogs or something on the side). What's also interesting is that the fact that some people buy the PSP as a non-gaming device seems to hurt software sales (plus piracy is a factor), yet software sales on the DS are pretty amazing.