With Nintendo's DS stealing the limelight recently, thanks to the launch of its Lite model, coupled with the machine's meteoric success over in Japan, Sony's PSP been somewhat stuck at the sidelines of late - despite a slew of quality games in recent months.

Now, speaking to Joystiq.com, Sony's senior PSP product manager John Koller has addressed the issue of PSP's place in the market, commenting on how he feels the success of the DS has affected Sony's own handheld ambitions: "There has been no impact on sales", Koller assured, "We have had steady sales since before the DS Lite and to today. Looking at it objectively they've had a very successful launch, obviously, and I think they're seeing a lot of Nintendo loyalists jump back in the market and there's a lot of retail initiatives to trade in your old DS for a DS Lite."

Koller continued, "If you look at the numbers, they did very well in June. But, if you look at our numbers since launch until now, we have outsold the DS by approximately 900,000 units in North America. Statistically speaking they had a holiday head start on the PSP, so in terms who have sold more overall has been a back and forth."

Comparing the difference between Sony and Nintendo's approach to the handheld market, Koller suggested, "They live in the gaming part of our competition and they have made a sharp turn to sort of the shorter Brain Age-type of games, which I think has been really successful for their consumer. I think they cater to more of the younger consumer whereas we cater to more of the older one, 18-24 target. We've had the longer, deeper software titles whereas they have gone shorter and more kid friendly."

Of course, Sony's PSP USP - if you will - has been the handheld's extensive multimedia capabilties, with Koller confirming the machine was always supposed to be about more than games: "It always was multifunctional. There was the appearance right at launch that it was going to be pigeonholed into just a gaming machine. We didn't necessarily want to go down that route. Gaming will always be at the heart of this. But, this has other benefits then just being a gaming system."

However, Koller acknowledged this jack-of-all-trades approach could damage the PSP's image in the long-run, with success boiling down largely to the way the machine is marketed: "We've learned lot of things. The first thing was how we market the product. You don't want to be all things to everyone because then you're nothing to no one. So, we've really tried to make gaming the heart of what we do and added many multifunctional elements to differentiate ourselves from the DS or the Video iPods."

As for the future, with UMD support from major Hollywood studios starting to dwindle, Koller explained the company is increasingly looking toward the internet for content distribution, "The UMD situation is an area we have been adapting to all along. How we operate in the download area is key. That's ultimately where we want to be as far as overall content like music, movies and games. We want to be in a place where a target consumer can easily access content to put on their Memory Stick. That's not to say we wouldn't want to continually utilize UMD, because we do. There's a tandem marketing push there."