Before we get into why the PLAYSTATION 3 is so wonderful, a brief rant. While a handful of gamers, many who have endured days of standing in line and had enough disposable income to spend what equates to a month's worth of rent to buy it, it's almost like the system hasn't been released in North America at all. Many will not get to experience the system before Christmas because there just aren't enough systems to go around, and that's a real shame.

As exciting as these new console systems are (We're including the Nintendo Wii in this), I think it's wrong to make people to wait in line (hours or even days at a clip) for a brand new system like they are vying for a loaf of bread or a toilet paper in Cold War era Soviet Union. I don't begrudge anyone that does, but for me and many others it just seems wrong. Console makers, retailers or whoever else you want to blame need to stop manipulating gamers and start providing enough systems at launch so that everyone that wants a system can get one without all this nonsense. Likewise, retailers and console makers need to stop saying they are "comfortable" with high prices when they aren't the ones buying these products - I don't remember anyone taking a survey of gamers asking them if they were "comfortable" with these price-points. Of course, how often do consumers get to set the price of anything? With all that said, let's take a look at what the PlayStation 3 offers "out of the box" and why you'll eventually want one when the time comes that you can actually get one if you haven't.

PlayStation 3 Inside

Cell:

The heart of the PlayStation 3 is it's Cell processor, which we've heard a lot about over the last few years. Developed jointly by IBM, Sony and Toshiba Corporation, the Cell Broadband Engine processor delivers up to ten times the performance of a typical home computer. In terms of real-world application, it means detailed and interactive environments, more enemies, larger battles, and hyper-realistic gameplay. The increased processing power of the Cell also means developers can create games that use real world intelligence, giving them the ability to closely mimic human reasoning and movement.

The Cell Broadband Engine consists of a main Central Processing Unit (CPU) and seven Synergistic Processing Units (SPU) to allow for more than 200 billion calculations per second and a clock speed of 3.2 GHz. Each synergistic processing unit (SPU) has its own fast memory for true parallel processing.

The PS3 also features the RSX graphics processing unit developed by NVIDIA, 256MB XDR Main RAM, 256MB GDDR3 VRAM, 512KB L2 cache, support for the USB 2.0 standard, Blutooth support, Blu-Ray disc support, and Wi-Fi support built in. What all this means in the real world is that the PS3 is capable of supporting high end games with advanced physics, high end high definition graphics with incredibly detailed and interactive environments, highly evolved artificial intelligence and incredible sound quality. While the first generation of titles available for the system look great in 2007 we can expect to see what this system is truly capable of.

Beyond all that the system is capable of supporting a variety of features like HD content via the Blu-Ray format while offering legacy support for the DVD format and previous PlayStation family formats as well (PlayStation 2, PSOne). Those with the premium version of the system will be able to transfer game saves and other data on their memory cards to the new system and will be able to use flash memory cards for other devices to store multimedia content like music, photographs and other data to the system.

There have been a few compatibility issues reported with older PlayStation family games, but SCEA has publicly stated that nearly 800 PS2 titles are playable now and a software update will be released soon to make these older titles work until the system is 100 percent compatible.