If you looked around Bolton town centre in mid-March you would have seen posters in the windows of shops such as GAME, GameStation, Argos, HMV and Woolworths advertising the PlayStation 3. They invited people to pre-order one of the machines ahead of the launch date of Friday, March 23.

Yet something stuck in the back of the mind.

Rewind a few months when the Wii was about to be launched and you couldn't pre-order one of Nintendo's consoles with just a few days to go. The same can be said of Microsoft's Xbox 360.

So why hasn't the PS3 - the much anticipated successor to the PlayStation 2 - sold out?

Maybe it's because it costs £425.

At around £100 more than the 360, and more than twice the price of the Wii, the PS3 is an expensive console.

It may be one of the most exciting pieces of technology ever created but the innovations of its rivals and the cheaper price points are having a major effect.

Ok, so Sony has made hundreds of thousands of machines available for the European market so that may well account for any excess supply.

But the fact that the 360 and the Wii have been allowed to steal a march and are proving themselves to be both solid and innovative is surely starting to dent confidence in the PlayStation.

It didn't help that Europe was supposed to be getting the machine last November. That launch was postponed because of manufacturing difficulties, causing Sony to lose the crucial Christmas market. And maybe news that the PS3 will not play every PS2 game is also hitting sales - the emotion engine chip present in American and Japanese machines has been removed destroying 100 per cent backward compatibility.

Doom and gloom then. But wait. The PlayStation 3 is still the most advanced console ever made. A machine that is great for games, perfect for movies and wonderful for people who want an all-round multimedia machine to sit under their (high-def) television.

Aimed at serious gamers (rather than the casual ones for which the Wii is predominantly catering), the PS3 will have some in-depth, long games that challenge the player. But you can be sure the innovations - the Eye Toys, the Guitar Heros - that brought so much pleasure to the 10 million PS2 users will also be present.

The graphics of the new games also promise to be spectacular. Although the leap from last gen to current gen is not currently as huge as, say, the switch from the PSOne to PS2, the latest games will be offering high-definition images, amazingly detailed backgrounds and super-fast movement. Games such as Motorstorm and Resistance: Fall of Man will take your breath away.

Then again, a lot of the games are just sequels of PS2 games. It's more of the same at the moment but with a few graphical twists. The obligatory driving game, Ridge Racer 7, is not amazingly special. And then there's Virtua Fighter 5 and Sonic the Hedgehog. Yet that situation will surely evolve over time. It has to.

As for films, well the PS3 offers Blu-ray, a rival to the HD-DVD format preferred by the Xbox 360. It's like the old Betamax verses VHS war all over again, only this time Sony will not want to be on the losing side. It owns a Hollywood studio and will do all it can to push this new format since a lot is riding on it. Sony may be smarting from the failure of the PSP's UMD format for movies but Blu-ray is different - there's a lot more at stake.

And for the humble film fan, at least watching Blu-ray on a high-def television will not fail to amaze, the crisp quality hitting you in the face the moment you begin to view.

So what else can you do with the PS3? Well everything really. You can surf the web, download content on to the 60GB hard drive (television, film and game downloads are promised) and you can play games online against others.

And with slots for most multimedia cards, such as those used in digital cameras, you can store and view photographs and music tracks. The PS3 can also read an iPod's contents, allowing users to copy over their own MP3s.

Yet maybe the best thing to do is wait and see. The price will surely come down over the coming months - Sony has already indicated that it wants a sub-£400 price point. The removal of the emotion engine also cuts manufacturing costs and we can expect this to be passed on in the future.

But for those too eager to wait, there are 28 games ready and waiting to be played (the most of any launch ever) as well as host of Blu-ray films to watch. One thing's for sure, it's going to be an interesting year.

But what do you think? Have you or will you be buying the PS3? Post your comments below.