(Thanks to Mark Gillespie)

Absolutely fantastic. Once this baby gets mainstream acceptance, there will be no stopping the PS3 in dominating this generation. Microsoft and the 360 can kiss their sorry unreliable @sses back where it belongs - making PC software…

Sony know the gamer market and the PS3 shows this. It’s everything you could want, and then some - it’s quiet, it has exceptional build quality, is reliable, and everything it does, it does it slick.

Updated to 1.60 firmware mostly without fuss - downloaded it last night onto a USB key, stuck it in the PS3, and did “Update From Storage Media”; took about 5 minutes. When it rebooted the controller was unresponsive, but removing the USB key kicked everything back into life.

Queued up all the demos and the Casino Royal 1080p trailer, while I went and played Resistance, and Motorstorm. Background downloading works really well, but there are some rough edges, like game updates can’t be background downloaded.

Played Black Hawk Down on Blu-Ray, and it looked stunning on my Panasonic 42in Plasma, really could not fault the PS3 Blu-Ray playback at all. It started very quickly, and played the movie better than any standalone HD players I have seen (HD-DVD and Blu-Ray units included).

Threw a few of my favourite CDs in, and imported them, so they are at hand. The media player is nice, with decent visualisations; it does CDDB so sucks all the track data from net. Copied aload of favourite pictures to the PS3, and really liked the slideshow, very stylish, Got favourable comments from people that saw that “wow, how did you do that..”..

Tried my PS2 games, which aside from GT4 and SSX3 all worked well (Crazy Taxi,
which was labelled as a 1* noticeable issues, was still very good, with slight graphical glitching).

The downsides. Games (currently), although the dry spell is almost over; there are some cracking games in the next 3-6 months, following Motorstorm, and RFOM. That said, however, considering these are launch titles, the EU launch line-up is perhaps the best console launch line-up of all time, I remember the 360, PS2 and PS1 launches, and the line-ups there were quite dodgy.

The other real problem is trying to not let the PS3 turn me into a couch potato. A very real problem - it’s simply THAT good.

Whilst people may moan about the price, if you want quality, you have to pay for it, and the PS3 is worth every penny, and then some.