On the 1st of April, the official Playstation Blog announced that PS3 firmware 2.70 was to go live “soon”. Well, if you check your PS3 today, you’ll notice it asking you to do a firmware update.
New features
The new firmware update brings several new features to the PS3. The biggest feature is the new Text Chat feature, which allows gamers to chat with up to 15 other players in up to three simultaneous chat rooms. Peripherals that can be used to chat include the onscreen keyboard, USB or bluetooth keyboards, or the new wireless keypad that attaches to the PS3 Sixaxis or Dualshock controllers.
Another new feature is the video backup facility, that allows one to backup purchased videos from the PS3 onto an external storage device such as USB mass storage devices or compatible memory cards. Videos purchased on PSP devices can also now be transfered to the PS3 and watched. Unfortunately, it would seem this video transferring capability is only available for US PS3 consoles.
Updates
Amongst the exciting new functionality, there were also updates to the XrossMediaBar (XMB) to allow sorting of the friends list by status, and also allowing for larger files (3mb up from the previous 1mb limit) to be attached to outgoing messages.
Demo video
The official Playstation Blog has a video demonstrating the Text Chat feature and mentioning a couple of the other features:
Comments