Despite the world wide economic recession, which is in full swing and set to continue for a while longer, there's one videogaming market that will see a big increase in the coming years, that of handheld devices, represented by the PlayStation Portable from Sony and the DS from Nintendo.

The report claims that the handheld market is still “set to buck weak conditions in the global consumer electronics market and rise by 4.9 percent in units and 8.2 percent in revenue during 2009, due to moves by Sony Corp. and Nintendo to freshen up their products.”

One of the keys to the continued growth of the market is the implementation of so-called “incremental updates” that see new versions of the gaming consoles released to replace the old ones, but without making the huge technical leaps that led from one generation to another.

Examples of this policy are the introduction of the PSP-3000 by Sony in October 2008 or the release of the Nintendo DSi, which is available in Japan and in North America. Sony is already said to be working on another upgrade for the PlayStation Portable, which has been dubbed the Go.

iSuppli is saying that handheld gaming consoles will grow to about 63 million units by 2013, which is quite an increase when knowing that there were 49.4 million units last year. The company believes that “While the long-term growth rate isn’t staggering by any means, Nintendo’s and Sony’s platform revisions should keep their portable game console shipments growing until they are able to roll out next-generation handheld platforms.”

According to iSuppli, Sony and Nintendo are not expected to introduce next generation handhelds until 2011 at the earliest, and Microsoft is not ready to invest the money needed to create a handheld. The way the iPhone from Apple could influence the market has not been detailed.