The good news (for the laughable media) is that meme is evergreen--they continue to trot it out to fly in the face of all objective evidence. Who knows: maybe someday it'll actually come true!

Well, I'm not sure about journalists still saying that PSP will destroy DS, but certainly their tactics haven't changed. I'm guessing back then they made a muchness over the ocassional month where NPD had PSP over DS, but weren't so vocal on the weeks DS was ahead. They made a big fuss about Wii being down on Black Friday in the US, and rightly so, but I've little doubt that the same attention will be given to Nintendo's bumper December.

No, the meme is that Nintendo is doomed, no matter how much success they have, not specifically the performance of the PSP vs. DS.

It's the coolness factor. It's hard to be wowed by the DS (unless you look at sales) when you compare it to the PSP. Frankly that goes for the Wii as well.

DS and Wii are gaming devices competing against HD multimedia devices of doom. The media love shiny objects.

Throw a couple new models out there to get some more sales.

DS was similar. Nintendogs, Mario Kart, and soon afterwards Brain Age, really started the DS.

Honestly, i remember the DS being outplaced by the PSP in Japan when they both came out, may be when adding Americas and Others there was a little shift in the No.1 place, but PSP did very well before the DS boom with AC:Wild World, etc, etc.

Just like how HD-Twins were and still are a little in comparision to the Wii.PS3 was going to kill the Wii but instead the Wii killed the PS3. Whta do you know???hmmm

It is hard to say how many people really own a DS...they've sold like ~700m games through Dec 09 for it. So if you just divide that over the systems shipped, its a 5.6 attach rate or so, but if there 25 million DS owners who have two DS rather than one then the attach rate is more like "seven games per owner". 

The model split is something like 90m DS Lite, 25m DS Phat, 10m DSi to date - so I think its fair to say at least 100 million individuals own a DS. If that is the case it should be able to breeze past 150m, as maybe a quarter of those users have more than one DS, and the potential for the system is probably at least 130 million individuals.