1. The phat PS3 looks cooler.

2. You can pretend you're old school

3. We don't know if the slim will be as ultra dependable as the phat. It hasn't been proven reliable.

4. All the cool mods/stickers are for the phat.

5. The phat is available right now, for the same price as the slim.

6. The phat is at the pinnacle of the phat PS3 technology.

7. The slim is just starting out, and might be untrustworthy, with some bugs that need ironing out.

8. The slim has nothing better than the phat, besides a few extra GBs of space on a slow HD you will replace anyway....besides energy efficiency, which  as we all know, is hippie crap.

9. The PS3 phat is the 2nd best high end BR player according to CNet. The slim didn't even chart, heh. I'll accept no excuses.

10. Sony is trying to clear out the potentially superior phats, so you'll be helping out Sony by buying one, and also, you won't be a fairweather Johnson. Win/Win.

So really, after I decided to buy this today, I thought that the phat was just the right choice for me. When the PS2 slim came out, and the PSP slim, and the DS slim, there were problems with them, like dead pixils, overheating, cracked hingest, bad screens, ect, and those all got ironed out in subsequent versions.

However, the phat has been perfected over many years, and is in what is very likely its final build. It has proven dependability, and since the slim has no mechanical additions, BC could be introduced just as easily in a phat or slim.

I think the smartest choice is to go with the phat, if this is your first PS3, unless you're buying it for prestige. The slim doesn't have any advantages, and it will very likely initially NOT have the dependability the 80gb PS3 is known for.

Why not go phat again, like me, and skip the slim until a few years when it's reached its height in technology and structure?

Let somebody else beta test the sucker, I says.