People must remember that when creating a "next genenration" console, making it "backwards compatible" is actually really difficult if you have changed the hardware significantly. In the case fo the PS3, it's an entirely new console - not some re-hash of an old console to give it a little more kick (like the xbox360) whilst being nearly 100% fully backwards compatible. Therefore with a completely new design (hardware wise) the PS3 offers better performance than it's current competitors at the sacrifice of backwards compatibility.

If you thinkg about it, those people looking to upgrade from their PS2 to a PS3 are wasting their time and money selling their old console to put a little extra towards a new one. I still have the original PS2 (i.e. the one before they made it quieter, then silver, then smaller - mines a first generation, noisy PS2) ... and it still works great after several years of ownership and lots of playing. There's no point selling it as even a brand new slimline PS2 would only fetch about £40 on it's own in the second-hand market.

Compare this to my xbox360, which had to get sent of for repairs just after it turned 1 year old ... and recently the hard drive failed. I called up xbox suport again, bu they kept giving me the excuse of "sorry but our system is down so we can't raise a repair order at this time, please call back later" (after getting me to do a variety of tests each time to bring up the error message) - the excuse was the same for 3 attempts in a row (over a period of about a week).

My Brother has an original European 60GB PS3 and he's had NO problems with it. I have played on it a lot and found it to be very easy and fun to use. If you have a PSP it adds extra fun - I have one and my Brother added my PSP to his system. I won;t go into full detail, but if you read up on waht you can do with your PSP and PS3 - it's impressive ;) - no other console can offer that kind of connectivity (basically you can use your PSP as a remote for your PS3, but you can also stream video and songs from your PS3 to your PSP, and with a hardware addon - record digital tv and stream / download it to your PSP via an internet connection - i.e. anywhere in the world!!!)

Ok so I don't own a PS3 ... but if I don't get one for my birthday, I'm buying one as I'm 100% sure I'm not wasting my money. It may not be very backwards compatible, but it's one hell of a console with a huge array of features ;)

- AlkoSoul

i gots a psp and i wants a ps3 with backwards they discontiued the only one with non lagy backwards the 20gb and i was wondering if there was a one with ps2 bacwards