It has been a long wait – especially for those of us in Europe – but the Playstation 3 (PS3) is finally set to arrive in the UK on 23 March 2007, almost a year after it was first scheduled for release and more than four months after its Japanese and US launch.

We were able to test drive the PS3 in our labs and, while the console we were given by Sony was a US retail unit, it won’t differ greatly from the version that will eventually be released on this side of the Atlantic, barring some region coding issues and online registration procedures.

In the flesh, the PS3 is certainly quite a force to be reckoned with. It weighs in at 5kg, which is the equivalent of precisely five-and-a-half PS2s. It certainly looks the business though, with shiny black casing and silver trim and ‘Playstation 3’ emblazoned across the top (or its side, if you stand the console vertically) in what appears to be the same font that’s used in the Spider-man movies.

There’s a lot of up-to-date technology packed into the big black box too, including a Blu-ray drive and full 1080p HD output. Interestingly, while buyers are being offered two slightly different editions of the console in other territories, the Euro-PS3 will only be available in its slightly more expensive form.

See our PS3 video preview

In many ways, this is good news, as it means desperate gamers won’t wind up settling for the cut-down version of the console (which only has a 20Gb hard disk and doesn’t feature built-in Wifi or memory card slots) when the inevitable stock shortages kick in. The cost, however, is not so rosy, since the ‘full’ console’s £425 official UK price tag makes the PS3 one expensive gaming machine.

The larger 60GB internal hard drive is going to come in handy, since the extended media centre functions of the PS3 make it the perfect repository for ripped music files, photos for slideshows and dowloadable content like movies, demos and trailers.

The internal hard disk drive is upgradeable. An access panel on the side allows you to remove the existing disk and instructions on replacing it are included in the manual (at least they are in the US manual). It’s also possible to play back and store media on external USB drives, so storage need never be an issue.

While the console itself is a little on the heavy side, the controllers feel too light. Anyone who has picked up a Playstation controller will notice the distinctive design hasn’t changed a great deal since the original Dual Shock – and that’s a good thing.

The new pad is called the Sixaxis, since it features motion sensing on six axes (see what they did there?). In one of the games we tried out we were able to use the Sixaxis as a steering wheel to drive a car (badly), but we’ve yet to see any software that takes advantage of the technology in quite the same way as the similarly motion-sensing Nintendo Wii Remote.