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A spokesman for Currys and PC World said: “It is disappointing but it is a dynamic market and we are confident that games and gaming are going to be hot sellers this Christmas.”

The delay further raises the stakes in Sony’s promotion of the Blu-ray disc technology. Sony, in a consortium with 100 other major companies, is pushing the PlayStation 3 as the first mass-release example of a Blu-ray disc movie player.

But it faces a rival technology created by Toshiba, and media analysts believe that any delay getting Europe “hooked” on Blu-ray could cost its consortium dearly.

In a last-minute upset to its plans, Sony discovered that the PlayStation 3, which contains a series of previously unreleased new technologies, takes longer to produce than its makers had forecast. Test production runs over the summer revealed manufacturing difficulties that reduced the capacity from four to two million units.

In a decision that Sony Computer Entertainment said was incredibly tough, it was decided that the missing units would be the ones destined for Europe. The delay is the latest in a string of glitches for the Japanese technology giant, and prompted Mr Kutaragi to admit that “Sony has to start getting its technology right”.

He pointed out, though, that previous console releases had been dogged by delays but the products had gone on to be huge successes. ()

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Blu-ray disc player

The stand-alone Blu-ray disc movie player has full high definition technology.

As flat-screen televisions have become cheaper and picture quality sharper, electronics companies have found a need to raise the picture and sound quality of the content that can be shown on them.

The Blu-ray Disc consortium, led by Sony and others, is backing a technology that uses a blue laser beam to read CD-sized discs that hold vast quantities of information.

Another large consortium, led by Toshiba, is backing an alternative, cheaper, technology.

e-Book

Sony’s e-Book is an attempt to crush, once and for all, the dominance of paper as a medium for reading.

Its revolutionary technology means that pages of text can be reproduced in “virtual ink” on a screen and an entire library of books can be stored on a single memory chip.

Unlike previous attempts at electronic books, the latest generation does not strain the eyes and a single battery can be used to turn 10,000 virtual pages.

Location-free TV box

This autumn Sony introduces a wireless transmitter that sits beneath the main television and allows anything being shown on it to appear on any other television in the home.

A DVD playing downstairs, for example, could be watched upstairs on a television in a bedroom.

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