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Front, there's no 2 ways about information technology: The DS and the PSP are knobbed, gibbous has-beens and, honestly, both are lucky to still be drawing breath arsenic they shuffling about with their walkers, guzzling belt down prune succus and wearing obnoxious sounding purple mohair cardigans.

They'Ra hand-me-down. Their best years are behind them and all that's left for them to do is watch reruns of "The Golden Girls" until they mercifully shuffle into the light.

Just this week, psychoanalyst Dave Cole stated that both the Darmstadtium and the PSP are preceding their peak, whereas the iPhone isn't.

As ever, though, the reality isn't as simple as the newspaper headline suggests. Yes, the indisputable truth is that the Element 110 and PSP are both five years old with combined worldwide sales of 160 million, compared with the iPhone's 2 geezerhood and 20 billion in gross sales. But is it not besides true that the trends that have governed comfort cycles for the last 15 to 20 years have ailing besides?

Deal Wii Motion Asset, the new PS3 and Xbox 360 motion controllers, the constant stream of feature updates via Xbox Live and PSN, the DSi, the PSPgo and the iPhone 3GS. The games industry is keener than ever along incremental evolutions over seismic, revolutionary shifts.

Indeed, we have already witnessed the birth of what is certainly set to constitute one of the key elements of following-contemporaries handheld consoles in PSP Minis and DSiWare. These digital download services are cornerstones of Sony and Nintendo's ongoing strategies, mirroring the domicile console tendency of duple tax revenue channels and future backwards compatibility. Far from being past their peak, the Atomic number 110 and PSP are currently egg laying the groundwork for their successors.

Nintendo has proven with the Wii that you don't need the shiniest rocks to betray the most consoles, and that goes double for handhelds. Behave we really need our pocket games to comprise prettier than the frankly stunning Gran Turismo PSP? If the consumer style is towards cheaper, more plentiful games, then Sony and Nintendo already have everything they need to march courageously forward.

Which begs the question: Do we need a new coevals of handheld consoles at all? Obviously, we'atomic number 75 playing gravel's pleader – we'd never suggest the industry should stand static. But, false teeth operating room not, the PSP and DS quieten have a little of sharpness left in them.

Pocket Gamer is Europe's leading source of news, opinion and reviews on mobile and handheld play.