Nintendo is pretty over the moon about the fact that the company has sold more than half a million Nintendo DS handhelds in the US last week. Almost 90% of the machines sent into US retail channels have been sold. Furthermore, with the run up to Xmas coming, the company expects to sell up to 1 million of the machines by the end of the year, and to have sold between 4 and 5 million by the end of 2005.

"To put the demand shown for the console in some sort of context, Nintendo also sold over 800,000 GameBoy Advance and derivative consoles during the same period. The GBA and GBA SP have bigger software catalogues, of course, but the DS can also run all those titles. The DS numbers still show impressive early adopter take-up."

Nintendo should be releasing details of European pricing in the first month of 2005.