Famitsu charts, Phoenix's face, Apple's game plan, and more PSP firmware rumours

If a week is a long time in politics, it's less than seven days on the Pocket Gamer blog, since we only update it Monday to Friday. But what an action packed less-than-seven-days they are!

This week began with rumours that Sony is to cut multimedia features from the PSP, and ended with a patent detailing Apple's apparent plans to add games features to its multimedia iPod.

Couldn't they just get together for a swap meet? It'd save billions.

If anyone could tell us how much, it'd be blogger Ed Fear and Famitsu magazine from Japan. Every week Ed crunches the charts for us and pulls out curious or astonishing facts. This week's Issuance from Ed's Sofa was the revelation that the new Pokemon games have already sold over three million copies, in Japan alone. That's a lot, especially if you've gotta catch 'em all.

Elsewhere we took a turn for the artistic, covering fan made PSP advertising and our very own DS editor Jon Jordan's flickr gallery of gamer's hands, which was picked up by the swell guys at Boing Boing. Rumours that Jon Jordan has retired and is taking it easy on his site's resultant Google AdSense advertising revenue are entirely false – he always looks like that when he's working.

If all this excitement is too much for you, maybe you should take a trip to the Electronic Handheld Game Museum. Or alternatively just browse the old stuff on eBay, where a rare gold Nintendo NES cart was on sale this week for $15,000. All this awaits, and literally much more, including an indispensable Mario Kart DS tip. Enjoy!