Apple had a press conference today; they announced some stuff and took the time to diss the Nintendo DS (and Sony) .

In Apple’s iPod conference today, they’ve taken a shot at the Nintendo DS and PSP saying that it just doesn’t stack up against the iPod Touch. Apple’s Phil Schiller said "…And people are starting to see what a great gaming device this is [the iPod Touch]. When you think about the companies that came before us… when you played those other systems, they seemed so cool, but now when you look at them, they don’t stack up against the iPod touch."

Apple says that the combination of the DS and the PSP having no multi-touch interface, expensive games, no App Store and no in-built iPod were the main reasons for the other handhelds not stacking up. These points were argued on the slides behind Schiller showing Tiger Woods 10 and Need for Speed Undercover on the PSP and the DS with their respective price points at American retail.

Apple says the iPod Touch (and, in turn, the iPhone) also has a greater range of titles, showing all the 21,178 available games for the iPod platform towering over the 3,680 games on Nintendo DS and 607 on the PSP. No word on how many of those are fart applications.

While the iPod and iPhone gaming platform does offer all those things Apple claim (and pretty neat graphics, too), the Nintendo DS does have a few plusses over the iPod. The main one being not only that it has touch controls (singular) but also a D-Pad and buttons. There are some great games on the iPod Touch, however, usually ones that are built from the ground up for the device and use the touch screen and tilt functions over virtual buttons. However, with cheapness comes quality concerns, with the vast majority of those twenty-one thousand games being somewhere between a fart application or a shoehorned PSP or DS port that just doesn’t work as well.

This is the first time Apple has come and bluntly attacked the opposition, targeting the iPod Touch as a gaming device and not just an iPod.

Pictures: Engadget