PS3 delayed!
Europe won't see Sony's console until next March - while the US and Japan releases proceed as planned. And that's official.
Uh oh - looks like Sony's plans for a near-simultaneous worldwide launch of the PS3 were a little too ambitious. The company has announced that the European launch of its super-console has been pushed back to March 2007. The US and Japan launches, scheduled for November 17 and 11 respectively, will go ahead as planned.
As some predicted, production problems with a Blu-ray drive component have led to Sony's four month delay. An official statement said, "the delay in the mass production schedule of the blue laser diode within the Sony Group, thus affecting the timely procurement of key components to be utilised in PlayStation 3."
The delay will prove a huge embarassment for Sony - which has always maintained that PS3 production was running at schedule for a full worldwide release - and is likely to be a cause for much high-fiving at Microsoft and Nintendo. Sony's rivals now have the lucrative run-up to Christmas all to themselves with the already-out Xbox 360 and soon-to-be-here Wii.
Handing over Christmas isn't the only setback arising from Sony's delay - there's also the fact that the PS3 was to have been the vanguard of Blu-ray's assault on Europe. At around £425, the PS3 would have been the cheapest fully-featured Blu-ray player on the market by some margin. Now consumers will have to shell out around £1,000 to get their hands on a Blu-ray disc spinner this side of the new year.
http://www.ntlworld.com/technology/n...oryid=39796931