PS3 by a long margin.

3DS doesn't have competition, PS3 had the Xbox360 that launched a year earlier and the Wii that took the world by storm, PS3 was sold at a loss so it was difficult to lower the astronomical price of $599, at least for a while. Besides, MS did everything to kill the PS3 by taking away a lot of exclusives, the only one (of the big ones) that stayed was Metal Gear Solid 4, a lot of people that watched E3 2008 declared that PS3 was doomed after the so called "MEGATON" from Don Mattrick and Yoichi Wada (the FF13 announcement), Sony had the worst 3 years ever before rising again with the Slim, new campaign ads (whoever came up with Kevin Butler is just a genius), a flood of 1st party titles, focusing on different markets (not just USA and Japan), i mean, they did everything in their power to survive this gen, and they went from distant 3rd place to 2nd place, beating the 360 in every market (except USA and UK i believe), and beating the Wii in Europe (or at least they're in the way to do that), no console ever had this turn of events...

The 3DS only had 2 problems: No games at launch and high price, nothing that they couldn't fix in a finger snap, and the PSVita is doing nothing to stop it, like MS did with Sony last gen...

It's not even a competition. The PS3 is easily the best comeback! It went up against the Wii & Xbox 360 which were blowing up & had a price far higher than them for most of the generation. It's advantage was 3rd party support that we knew was always gonna come!

Let's hope the WiiU and the Vita can join that list ;)

There never was a real turnaround for PS3. They just took way too long to close the gap due to a delayed launch. Several threads already discussed this topic.

PS3.

Everyone and their mother was convinced the PS brand (A lot of people thought Sony itself would go broke) would be discontinued by 2009. And look at where we are now!

Both made great comebacks, but definetely the 3DS was the biggest surprise.

Everyone was just talking about how doomed it was and that Nintendo couldn´t do anything, that Vita would destroy it, negative press all around..... and see now what´s happening. It´s dominating the handheld market by a very large margin and no sign of slowing down.

PS3 also did a great comeback, but there weren´t many doom talks at that time. Actually, the dumb videogame press barely talked about its struggle, opting to ignore it. And it didn´t dominate its market as 3ds dominates now, but managed to get a good chunck of it in the end.

Obviously the market is still different if the 3DS could make it at all. If they're on different markets, they're not really competing that much. If smartphones could offer the same kind of experience as handhelds, handhelds would probably stand no chance just because almost everyone has a smartphone anyway. This could change, though, as smartphones evolve.

ps3.

Because 3DS had no competition. PS3 competed against 360/Wii and still turned around. 3DS's competition (Vita) was so weak, you can confirm that 3DS had a monopoly on the handheld console market.

ps3
not just because of price etc but
because of the lack of systemsellers.

3ds had Mario&Zelda
+pokemon,MH etc to come

PS 3 only had GT5 which was delayed year after year after year and had to create new system selling ip's like UC+ps3 was pemanently bashed by the anglosaxon media for every little thing while 360 was worshipped.

Really, this.  People expected the PS3 to explode in sales but instead, it just sold really well.  I think we even had graphs that showed the PS3 was selling better than the PS2 when you alligned launches.  It lost a lot of money, sure.  The reason it looked like it was doing badly was because the Xbox 360 was doing better than anyone expected.  Hell, how many people posted in threads saying "The PS3 outsold the 360 every year!".