The 3DS’s sales — $1.2 billion including software — mark an important milestone for the company and its dual-screen portable 3D-game system, which had a bumpy start in the first half of its initial year of sales.

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Though it won’t arrive in the U.S. until Feb. 22, Sony’s newest handheld gaming device has stumbled out of the starting gate in Japan. The device sold 321,400 units in two days, but on Monday, Sony issued an apologetic statement after complaints emerged that the Vita was freezing and crashing.

But, for what it’s worth, there is a common thread between the two products: Sony’s new gadget was developed in part by one of the original creators of one of the most successful consumer-electronics devices of all time.

As the PlayStation blog reports today, the look and feel of the Vita was designed by Takashi Sogabe of the Sony Corporate Design Centre. It also notes that Sogabe, who has been at the company for 27 years, worked on the original Walkman.

While it probably isn’t entirely accurate that he worked on the original Walkman (since it came before Sogabe’s time), a bio on Sony’s Web site gives him credit for a “See-through Walkman,” and a “Beautiful Walkman.” He also worked on the PlayStation 3 and Sony’s e-reader.

The PlayStation blog will be posting a full interview with Sogabe later, but today’s post did offer some details.

Sogabe said the design team came up with various versions of the Vita, including one with a sliding back, and another that snapped shut like a clamshell.

He also said that they tried to incorporate two touchpads in place of the dual analog sticks, but that they weren’t accurate enough.

(Takashi Sogabe image courtesy of Sony)

(Walkman images courtesy of Wikipedia)

That figure confirms that Nintendo is definitely one of this country’s leading portable gaming manufacturers, but for comparison’s sake, we dug up numbers for the iPod touch, which is likely Apple’s most comparable device, rather than the always-connected iPhone or its larger and more expensive cousin, the iPad.

In a lawsuit, Apple revealed that as of March 2011 it had sold more than 60 million iPod touch devices worldwide since late 2007.

While those aren’t entirely comparable numbers — one is worldwide and the other is only in the U.S. — many are saying that Apple’s products are starting to eat into Nintendo’s traditional base of players. With these figures being so close, and Apple claiming that the iPod touch is the No. 1 portable game player, you can start to see why.

Last month, Nintendo sold more than 260,000 Nintendo 3DS units in the U.S., an increase of more than 10 percent from the previous month, following a much-needed price drop on Aug. 12.

The numbers were part of the NPD Group’s monthly figures, which state the overall health of the videogame industry. Generally, September is a sleepy month, as consumers hold off on making any big purchases and manufacturers delay big launches until the holidays.

The NPD Group said spending on hardware and software in September totaled $1.16 billion, falling 6 percent from the same period a year earlier, when consumers spent $1.23 billion. The sales only represent physical retail sales and do not include digital sales, which are fast becoming a big chunk of the industry.

During the month, software sales were helped out by the newly released Madden NFL by Electronic Arts, which was the top selling-game during the month.

The biggest unknown is price, which went unmentioned during the demo. My assumption is that Palm would try to take market share by coming in significantly lower than the $200 or so Apple wants for its iPhone. But when I ran that theory by Palm CEO Ed Colligan, he looked at me liked I’d peed on his rug. ‘Why would we do that when we have a significantly better product,’ he asked, then walked away.”

– Peter Kafka, MediaMemo

CEOs and Palm evangelists convinced that Palm’s new Pre handset is anything more than table stakes at the handset poker game would do well to consider two bits of Apple (AAPL) news and rumor that suggest Cupertino may be hard at work on a next-generation handset capable of mercilessly beating all others into sobbing submission.

The first: A rumor that iPhone 3.0 will support quad-core processors destined for an upcoming iPhone hardware revision. If this proves true and Apple (AAPL) does release a multi-core GPU iPhone–which is not as much of a stretch as you might think–it would likely support features we’re more accustomed to seeing on the PC. And as The Apple Core’s Jason O’Grady notes, “It would slaughter pretty much every portable gaming platform on the market.”

The second: Apple has applied for a patent on a behind-screen camera that could capture images “while the display elements are in an inactive state (in which the display elements are darkened and at least partially transparent).” It doesn’t take much of a leap to see that technology brought to bear on a next-gen iPhone and the long rumored iChat AV Mobile.

Those are two potential killer features for a device that already has three things the Pre does not: a maturing platform, a thriving developer ecosystem and a market leading music player and store. Are they just rumor and speculation? For now, certainly. But given the pace of innovation in the mobile industry, and more specifically, at Apple–where the multi-touch phone that Palm (PALM) is now aping originated two years ago–they’re not beyond the realm of possibility, are they?