I love how quiet the PS3 runs and operates. The first time I booted up my Xbox 360, I was stunned by how loud it was. In contrast, the first time I turned on the Playstation 3, it was so quiet I wasn't sure if I'd turned it on or not! Sony deserves major credit for getting this aspect right, with the exception of my Gamecube, this is the quietest console I've ever owned. I also appreciate the integrated power supply. It has been a year but I still remember the jokes about the Xbox 360's massive power brick, not to mention the reports of overheating consoles, many of which were caused by this monstrosity. Kudos to Sony on both of these.

I'm also a huge fan of Sony's decision to support an upgradeable hard disk drive. Microsoft really dropped the ball here with their puny 12GB hard drive (remember that 8GB of the Xbox 360's 20GB is reserved for system files). With many game demos now consuming up to a gigabyte of hard disk space, and Microsoft now providing HD movie downloads, 12GB isn't nearly enough. Personally I like the fact that the PS3 ships with a Blu-ray drive. As anyone with an HDTV will tell you, there isn't nearly enough HD content out there right now, so having a high definition optical drive ship with the console is a really nice plus. Even if I wasn't a gamer I'm still a movie buff so this is a really nice feature for me. As an added bonus, inside the PS3's packaging Sony includes $70 worth of mail-in rebates in Blu-ray movies from all the major movie studios (it's a $10 MIR per studio). But as good as these features are, there's a lot I don't like about the PS3.

The online experience with the Playstation 3 isn't nearly as polished as Xbox 360. Sony uses a 2-foot user interface for the Playstion Store rather than a 10-foot interface. This means that a mouse and keyboard is basically required if you want to download demos, and even then it's still a little irritating. The Playstation store and downloading updates is also ridiculously slow. It took me at least 30 minutes to download the 1.2 system update, and I'm on a pretty fast cable modem. Downloading demos is an even more frustrating experience (90 minutes for a sub-100MB file isn't uncommon). The store doesn't list the file sizes of the various demos/trailers inside the store, so you don't know how large the file is until you begin downloading it. And don't even get more started on the lack of an autoresume feature or the ability to queue up downloads. You literally have to sit there until the download is complete, you can't even pop in a CD or watch a DVD/Blu-ray movie!

The worst part about the Playstation store is, there are only at best, a few hundred thousand people online with their PS3s right now, I can't imagine how slow this is going to get once more PS3s are out in the wild. It's a good thing Sony's service is free, because in current form, it's not worth paying for.

I know back when the PS2 launched in 2000, backward-compatibility was a big feature, but I don't really feel that way this time around with PS3. Unlike the Xbox 360, the PS3 won't upscale my old PS2 games, and I've already got a PS2, so if I want to play a PS2 game, I'll play it on my PS2. After all, at least on my PS2 I've got force feedback support. The lack of an HDMI cable isn't a big deal to me either (although a component cable would've been nice to include), I can understand Sony's decision on this to cut costs. Besides, Monoprice.com has HDMI cables starting as low as $4, I chose the $18 high-quality 24AWG HDMI cable myself.