i.e. Price, games, multimedia, online community, etc.iSConman
Price
Hardware-wise, the Playstation 3 is unarguably a better deal. After all, considering the fact that they were selling the console for less than it cost them to make, it's pretty clear that even if you made it yourself you wouldn't get such decent hardware at such a low cost. Additionally, if you like the look of the Wii-control scheme (not talking about the Wii-exclusive games here), and don't already own one, you can essentially pick yourself up a very respectable substitute for a small price with Playstation Move. Kinect, on the other hand, may be more revolutionary, but is significantly more expensive.Games
Despite this, when it comes to games its a lot down to opinion and your preference in games. Although the PS3 appears to be getting more exclusive content and features than before (e.g. exclusive DLC in Mafia 2, YouTube video uploading Just Cause 2, Dead Space Extraction with Dead Space 2 etc.), there's a very clear tendency for multiplatform games to perform better on the Xbox 360. To most non-gaming people and for most modern games, the differences aren't noticable unless you compare them side by side, but there's the odd game where the effect is quite noticable. Obviously, another important aspect of the games is the exclusives. Personally, I prefer current (and like the look of future) PS3 exclusives more than Xbox 360 exclusives, but there's no arguing that the likes of Halo: Reach and Alan Wake are enough to make non 360-owners envious. From what I can tell, my favourite PS3 games tend to attempt to break new grounds with what can be achieved within a game, developing new genres of their own (e.g. LittleBigPlanet, Heavy Rain, Flower), while XBox 360 exclusives tend to be incredible iterations of well-established genres (e.g. Halo, Fable). If you're more into mainstream genres, Xbox 360 is probably a more suitable choice at this point.
Multimedia
The offerings of each console will vary depending on what country you live in (e.g. Sky for Xbox, PlayTV and the newly announced LoveFilm for PS3 in UK, while Netflix is only available in the US), and its quite possible that this will make one more appealing than the other. Additionally, it depends on whether you want to spend more on additional subscriptions, or whether you're just looking to take advantage of whatever is available for free or a one-off cost. While people often regard the Xbox 360 to be superior in the multimedia front, due to compatibility with Windows Media Center, among other things, the PS3 also offers a fair share of features that make it stand out. The biggest one is obviously Blu-Ray, which is something that really pushes the value of the console up if you don't already own one. Additionally, as far as I can tell, across different regions, Sony will be offering at least 4 different movie-streaming services to take your fancy (LoveFilm, MUBI, Netflix and Playstation Store). I'm fairly certain that, because Sony owns its own film companies, the Playstation Store now offers a larger number of films than the Xbox Marketplace, but I'm not entirely sure. Both companies continually add to the value of their respective consoles, particularly in the multimedia front, and it could really change who's in the lead at any point. That said, the PS3 will always have Blu-Ray on its side, and benefits from the (be it somewhat lackluster) web-browser that allows for streaming things for free on demand.
Online Community
This is a really difficult question to answer without stereotyping, but here's how I tend to think of it. Xbox 360 owners (as the sales would suggest) tend to prefer more mainstream games. This means that, if you want to play a mainstream game, there will always be plenty of people to play with. That said, it means that the distribution of people is less even, meaning that if you decide you like a game that isn't very popular, you may have difficulty finding a game where you wouldn't necessarily on PS3. To give an example, Haze (despite flopping) still has an active community, and it's pretty much always possible to find a game. When it comes to people, I don't think it's fair to generalise, but I've found that on PS3, there tends to be groups of Europeans (with headsets) who play certain games more than others (e.g. I've noticed there's more Spanish people with headsets on Warhawk than there are English people, from experience). Clearly, this can mean that sometimes its hard to find people to talk to, because they don't necessarily seak the same language (this makes sense because the PS3 is far more popular in continental Europe than the US and UK). Add in the fact that so few people have headsets, and you will find that you will rarely be speaking with people online on PSN. There are some random exceptions (like, Uncharted 2 tends to have lots of people wearing headsets for some reason), but generally speaking PSN is fairly silent. This is actually a good thing to some people, as it means you don't have to put up with the obnoxious types (which I hasten to add are present on both networks) - I actually prefer not wearing a headset (I never do on Xbox LIVE), so it's not an issue to me. For social types though, if you prefer playing with strangers over friends, Xbox LIVE is probably superior.
That said, Playstation Home is a great place to meet new people. It is easily the 'game' where I get most random friend invitations per session out of everything I've ever used. It's not for everyone, but if you fancy the idea of meeting new people, collecting prizes and participating in fun little minigames, then it's definitely something to think about considering it's free. In regards to the online experience, feature-wise, Xbox LIVE is still vastly superior due to cross-chat and a fully-integrated party system (its present in a few PS3 games, but isn't very effective). That said, the overall infrastructure of PSN is a lot stronger than people believe - to those who claim that it isn't as reliable or capable, they should check out the number of games that support 32 players and above on PS3, while there are virtually none on Xbox 360 that do.
Overall, here's how I see it - if you like mainstream things and don't want Blu-Ray, go with the Xbox 360, otherwise, pick the PS3.
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