SPOnG was informed at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival yesterday that the PS3 has an amazingly low "default rate" at "around 0.2%", according to Sony Computer Entertainment Europe founder, Chris Deering.

If true, this is a hugely impressive statistic and is considerably less than the industry standard of three to five percent.

The news is particularly of note in the context of Microsoft’s recent troubles with faulty, overheating ‘red ring of death’ Xbox 360s, with the default rates of initial batches of 360s clearly way over that industry standard, with some console repair companies suggesting that almost a third were broken.

Microsoft has of course since taken steps to deal with those problems, allocating $1.15 billion dollars to fix the problem. A rather expensive ‘teething problem’ by anybody’s standards!

Elsewhere, SCEA’s senior director of corporate communications Dave Karraker has also been unfavourably comparing the Xbox 360's reliability to that of the PlayStation 3, writing on the official PlayStation Blog that:

"A lot of noise has been made recently about the reliability issues of one of our competitor's systems. So, not surprisingly, some of our more ambitious PlayStation faithfuls [from fan site PS3 Vault] decided to run their own stress test on the PlayStation 3. They put it in a freezer at zero degrees for up to 108 hours and they put it in a sauna at 120 degrees for up to 64 hours -- all the while running games and Blu-ray Disc movies on it. Did it fail? Nope. Like the Energizer Bunny, it kept going and going and going. Probably not something you want to try at home, but our thanks to the guys at PS3 Vault for putting our system through the ringer."

More on that madness here.

WARNING: Do not try playing SPOnG's current PS3 favourite Heavenly Sword (pictured) in your sauna at home kids!