Some insights from a recent study by NPD about portable gaming (collected from over 3,200 pre-identified sample owners of portable devices from September 16-23):

"79 percent [of those polled say] they use their portable device in-home, far more than any other location. (...) Gameplay is the feature used by most (84 percent) on the PlayStation Portable. Slightly more than one third of PSP owners are watching movies (35 percent) and listening to music (33 percent) on their device (...) Ninety two percent of Nintendo DS owners are playing games by themselves followed by close to one quarter playing games with friends locally using one game cartridge. (...) Listening to music dominates iPod usage (96 percent) followed by playing games (20 percent) at a distant second."

Although it's not mentioned in the article, I guess it's a US study. The conclusion states that (1) these devices may be competing with more stationary entertainment devices for a user’s time, (2) the scope of gaming devices is changing to entertainment devices, (3) "iPods/iPhones are being treated as entertainment devices. Why do I blog this? interesting evolution in the last few months wrt mobile entertainment. I also wonder about the range of applications, especially on the Nintendo DS as there are more and more cartridges which are not really games (such as Hello Kitty diary for example). The possibility to design non-games is more and more intriguing in this field.