It may cost £425, and have suffered one of the most overhyped technology releases ever when it went on sale in the UK and Europe last Friday, but there is a hidden depth to the PlayStation 3 that will offer Sony the perfect antidote to all the negative press.
Sony's flagship product, and its huge processing power, is also expected to represent a significant boost to a groundbreaking medical research project.
The console's ability to connect to the internet means that anyone who has bought a PS3 can download a program that signs them up to Folding@home, a project set up by the chemistry department of California's Stanford University that aims to understand how so-called protein folding causes conditions like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.
The understanding of protein folding - how biological molecules assemble themselves into a functional state - is one of the outstanding problems of molecular biology.
But by using a global network of computers to test simulations of folding and misfolding, the Stanford project hopes to understand the development of many diseases, including Alzheimer's, BSE (mad cow disease), cancer, Huntington's and cystic fibrosis, and examine how potential drugs will bind to proteins in the body.
Folding@home works through what is known as the process of "distributed computing", where the spare capacity of idle processors is harnessed via the internet to form a network of computers. The resulting "supercomputer" is able to build simulations that would otherwise take much longer to run. (Another similar scheme is SETI@home, the project set up by Berkeley in 1999 to employ internet-connected computers in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.)
Since the project began in 2000, Folding@home had previously been open to anyone with a computer - Mac or PC - but the 300,000 PCs signed up to the project had, until March, only generated about 100 teraflops worth of calculations. (Flops - or floating point operations per second - are a measure of a computer's speed. A teraflop is a trillion calculations per second, about the processing capability of a human brain.)
But since the PS3 went on sale in the United States and Japan last year, Sony says that around 25,000 owners have activated the preinstalled Folding@home software. And 1,000 users have signed up in the UK so far. With the console's new Cell processor, the power generated by the combined consoles has soared to 990 teraflops, and PS3s now account for about 70% of the project's total computations.
Viewing the model with the PS3's graphics is a huge advance from the PC - it's fully 3D, the colours are vivid and crisp and you can zoom in and out of the protein model being mapped, seeing it from different angles. You can also swoop around the globe and see who is logged onto the project with their PS3 - indicated by glowing lights concentrated in Japan, the UK, Europe and the US (none in Antarctica yet).
Gamers are also likely to be enticed to the project, as users - or donors as the programme calls them - can join other members and form a team to increase their ranking in the research project. Those donors who help to solve a particular protein problem win points, and rivalries between teams create friendly competition that benefits the whole research project.
In the seven years since it began, the Stanford project has made major breakthroughs in molecular simulation, and the university says that calculations which were previously considered impossible have now become routine. So far, it has published results on peptides in nanotubes, amino acid mutations in cancer, and recreated folding simulations of several small proteins in record timescales. (You can see a full list of projects that the supercomputer is currently working on here).
With the project about to break the petaflop mark - that's a thousand trillion floating point operations per second - who knows what extra discoveries the PS3 can help to make?