Korean home shopping channel sells out of PS3's in 3 minutes

While the launch of Sony's PlayStation 3 in Korea has gotten a lot more blog-time here than you'd expect, it's because of the surprisingly different model they are receiving. An 80GB hard drive, downloadable content and video on demand support (TV shows, etc), lack of the Emotion Engine chip for emulation ... it's like a different console! Perhaps that's one of the reasons why consumers grabbed the system quicker than announcers would be able to talk about the available features.

If you read slowly, the time it took you to get to this paragraph is about the time it took for PS3's to sell out on a popular Korean home shopping channel. Putting 200 units up for pre-sale, the hosts of the show prepared to talk people into buying the expensive system by highlighting all the features. It wasn't necessary. All 200 systems were sold in under three minutes. Sony is amazed and baffled: they expect decent demand for the system now, but they didn't get to talk about what the system could do before they were all gone! Enjoy your PS3 launch next Tuesday, Korea. It seems you're ready for it.