News 

While early demand for the long-awaited successor is expected to be high, the launch, some four months after the games console went on sale in the USA and Japan, did not generate the scrums that surrounded the sale of the first Nintendo Wii units in December.

Whether this is due to the PS3's price - in the region of £425, £260 more than the Wii - or to the fact that units are readily available around the country, while the Wii was in short supply, remains to be seen.

Certainly Sony will be hoping that PS3 does rather better than it did in the US after launch. In December it was outsold by both Wii and Microsoft's Xbox 360, though the biggest seller was the console that the PS3 was designed to supersede, the hugely successful PlayStation 2. Nothing much appears to have changed since, with PS3 languishing in 33rd place in Amazon's chart of best-selling games hardware. Figures from research firm NPD showed Nintendo selling three times as many consoles as Sony, which in turn sold half the number that Microsoft managed, prompting speculation among analysts that a price cut may be imminent.

Sony CEO Howard Stringer, for one, is well aware that the price will determine whether the console is a success, admitting in a television interview that 'if we fail, it is because we positioned PS3 as the Mercedes of the video game field'.

Price aside, the PS3 is certainly packs a lot of power into its slim-line casing. At the heart of the machine is a 3.2Ghz Cell processor, especially developed in conjunction with IBM and Toshiba and capable of generating 218 gigaflops of floating point performance. That is coupled with a new 'Reality Synthesizer' graphics chip from Nvidia that throws

The GPU supports high-definition video up to 1080p and in addition to a standard analogue video-out port, HDMI is provided for digital output to HD TVs.

Dolby 5.1 channel surround sound with digital-out is also on-board as are a host of networking and I/O options: Ethernet up to 1000BASE-T; 802.11b/g Wi-Fi; Bluetooth 2.0+EDR; six USB 2.0 ports and support for Memory Stick, SD and CompactFlash memory cards.

Also included is a Blu-ray drive, one feature that has contributed to the console's high price.

Sony is banking on PS3 to drive the adoption of Blu-ray as the successor to DVD, beating the rival HD DVD technology in the process. There is a feeling that its desire to recoup its investment in Blu-ray through PS3 sales may have more of an impact on console sales than it does on Blu-ray adoption. However recent research suggests that the opposite will be true and that eventually the demand for HD content will make the PS3's Blu-ray capabilities one of its main selling points.

But in the short-term the biggest determiner of success will be the games that are available. Ironically, while Sony was prepared to add more than £50 to the price of a console by including Blu-ray, it has cut costs in Europe by dropping a chip that in the US and Japanese models provides graphics and data processing for PS2 games. Although the console will still be equipped with a different chip that processes graphics for older games, Sony admits that the backward compatibility of the machine will be lessened. As a result it has published a list of PS one and PS2 games that will be playable on PS3, plus information on ensuring maximum possible compatibility.

Information on available PS3 games can be found at uk.playstation.com.