Near the bottom of a New York Times article on how iPhone owners love gaming lie two remarkable quotes:

But even though [Sony] is responding to trends that iPhone is driving, Mr. de Leon said the company is not worried that Apple’s device will take over their core audience. “At the end of the day, you buy the iPhone to make calls,” he said. “And you buy the PSP to play games.”

Cammie Dunaway, vice president for sales and marketing for Nintendo, echoed similar sentiments about the company’s lineup of portable hand-held gaming devices. “No one can match our years of experience in the hand-held market and the subscriber base we’ve built up over the last 20 years,” she said. — Yet Another Vogue for the iPhone: Video Games, New York Times, June 28, 2009

These two quotes are remarkable because they’re so similar to Palm CEO Ed Colligan’s remarks about Apple’s then-rumored iPhone prospects:

Responding to questions from New York Times correspondent John Markoff at a Churchill Club breakfast gathering Thursday morning, Colligan laughed off the idea that any company — including the wildly popular Apple Computer — could easily win customers in the finicky smart-phone sector.
“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.” — Response to question at Churchill Club breakfast by New York Times correspondent John Markoff, San Jose Mercury News, November 2006

We know how that worked out.

Sony and Nintendo appear to miss the fact that Apple is creating a new casual gaming market: customers who wouldn’t have purchased a traditional hand-held gaming system, much less carried it around town, think nothing of whipping out their iPhone for a little gameplay, in part because they can also whip out their iPhone for directions, news, e-mail, and any number of other things.

The iPhone doesn’t have to be better than a PSP or a DS. It just has to good enough that you wouldn’t lug that second device around.

Sony’s comment that you buy the iPhone to make calls and the PSP to play games overlooks a simple fact that consumers won’t: with the iPhone, you can do both.