Sony showed off Playstation 3s at CES

THE PS3 WAS at CES after all, but it was only a mockup. It looked good, very good, but if you dug under the surface, it came up hollow. The good part is that they were shiny, and that is about it.

The problem is that people working on PS3s tell me that it is far from done. Several companies are hip deep in hardware debugging as you read this. Not that it is hugely surprising, after all, it isn't out yet, but one would expect that the hardware is nearly finalized and the bulk of the work is on the games right now.

Nope. Both are far from done. The evidence was quite clear at the keynote, there wasn't even a live demo of the box, something that Sony would kill to show right now to cut MS off at the knees. Instead they had pre-rendered video, oh yay, that is going to strike fear in the hearts of Redmond dwellers.

Now, if Sony fixes the bugs tomorrow, due to the time it takes to push a spin through the fabs, you won't see final PS3 silicon until March, April for boards and consoles in small quantities. Add another month for ramp up, and you are talking May for availability if absolutely nothing goes wrong.

Sources have told us that this rosy scenario is at odds with the work going on right now, expect debugging to go on for quite a while yet. Add minimum 4 months to the end date, and you have a possible release time. The long and short of it is, don't expect a PS3 before E3, and even that is a very long stretch. µ