I am sure Sony is well on top of thngs as far as their technological development is concerned. Let's keep in mind that the Xbox 360 is already on the market, so any "amazing" technologies it may be boasting are already available to the also impressive minds at Sony. What more do they need to do then to buy an Xbox, gut it and make sure they improve on it . . .
Sony will Rule Xbox yet again . . . And the cries of the few will be drowned by the cheers of the happy PS3 owners.

Really they can talk all they want about how one system's hardware is going to be better than the other. When it comes down to it the games will decide which is the better system and if it's hard to port from one to the other you're gonna see a lot of people buying both instead of waiting for the port.

Gee, no bias on Microsoft's part here.  What experts like this fail to realize is that most consumers are never going to micro-manage their purchase choice down to such low-level technological details.  Further, is the average gamer really going to notice a difference anyway?  We've all seen the games on the horizon and both platforms have fantastic offerings for players.  As Milamber said above, the games will ultimately decide who buys what.  Halo fans will buy Xbox 360, Final Fantasy fans will buy PS3.

I think Sony is in trouble because of their price.

$600 is a lot for a machine that the general consumer (namely parents) associates only with games. For the price of a PS3 you can buy an XB360 plus a Wii.

To make matters worse, our economy is in a bit of a slump and property prices are dropping which is going to make things worse. Interest rates are rising and many key industries are suffering from reduced or negative profits this year.

Consumer expendable income will decrease because of these factors and that puts a lot more weight onto price considerations.

While I'm sure the PS3 is a great machine the price is high enough to make their target group (parents & teens) balk.

"$600 is a lot for a machine that the general consumer (namely parents) associates only with games. For the price of a PS3 you can buy an XB360 plus a Wii." - quote Stan

Uh! Keep in mind that 1, XBOX 360 was release for how much?? $400 w/o the big HD. 2, you're getting a next gen gaming console PLUS a Blu-Ray player which by the way is too damn expensive. Sony in a sense is doing it's consumers a favour by bundling the two. Yeah, it might not be as impressive graphically as the XBLAH but then again ... Sony isn't making a computer in sheeps(gaming) clothing.

One good thing comes out of this though, true gamers and will finally see the divide and so will developers. Sports and junk can have the XBOX. Anything worth entertaining the mind and heart can stay with Sony. I'm not biased. I just see Microsoft for the monopolizers they are. And Sony for the proprietary monsters they can be. In the end, we the consumer is out of pocket ... period!

xntrk,

I agree that if you take into consideration that PS3 has a built in BluRay player it's actually not too bad of a value... heck, it's the world's cheapest BluRay player.

Remember that the target audience is teens and parents. Parents won't see the PS3 as a BluRay player but as a "video game machine" and from that standpoint the added cost makes it a very expensive video game machine.

Additionally, HDTV adoption, while growing, is still pretty low. Without a HDTV BluRay really has no advanges over plain old DVD (actually it has more disadvantages, same goes for HD-DVD in this regard).

I remember when people thought having a DVD-ROM in the PS2 would be a huge selling feature. While it didn't hurt, a very small portion of the people who bought a PS2 actually used it to watch movies.

Sony does have one saving grace, though, and you hit it in your post. It's the divide among game genres. XBox seems to gets sports and tons of FPS games. Sony gets all the good RPGs - Square is a force to be reckoned with.

As for entertaining the mind and heart... Nintendo is making some very aggressive moves with the Wii... but I doubt Wii will get them anywhere close to X360/PS3 numbers.

One way or another, I think this will be an exciting year for consoles with so many break-throughs coming in and the intense competition between brands. I'm sure the big-three-companies will be providing us with "forum fodder" for quite some time to come! :)

Stan

Sony isn't making a computer in sheeps(gaming) clothing.

Oh please, the PS2 is the closest console to a computer by far.  Sure, not in terms of processing power and no it didn't originally ship with a hard drive but for the love of god it's the only console to support a keyboard.  Hell FFXI is the only game that I know of that allows console gamers to play with PC users.

Alright I'm done my rant.

As for the market (parents) not recognizing the PS3 as a BluRay player I'm gonna hafta agree with Stan on this.  The kids are gonna want it for games and parents don't tend to educate themselves on the additional features of gaming systems unless they play them.  So unless Sony pushes to brand it as a cheap BluRay player rather than a gaming console that feature will be overlooked by parents.

The Wii seems more geared for the Asian audience IMO. They tend to be more into the interactive games like DDR and the Wii controls play into that perfectly.  For the rest of the world it'll be fun to try out but I've got a feeling it'll get old pretty quick.

I am not a big M$ fan!!!!
But I will admit, I like playing video games on an Xbox, the games feel a bit better & graphics look better(some games). On the other hand Sony has tons & tons of games and not 2 mention the PS1 as well.

Still I gotta hand it 2 M$ Xbox is a OKAY machine to play games.

Sony is putting way too much weight on the whole Blu-ray functionality of this console.  Granted, it is the cheapest Blu-ray player thus far, but puts the PS3 in a real bad price bracket against the 360 and Wii.

Remember the Cell Processor that comes stock in your PS3? It’s the one that was supposed to be the ultimate...