PS3 Firmware upgrade brings new Text Chat feature

Posted by Al Warmington on Thu 2 Apr 2009

Sony gives PS3 another dollop of updates

Ladies and gentlemen; set your consoles to update. Sony has just released PS3 Firmware patch v2.70 for your downloading pleasure.

The console maker does like to tease out its updates in regular bite-sized morsels, so don’t expect this upgrade to go all New Xbox Experience on you. That’s not to say it doesn’t have some interesting functionality though. Here’s what you get:

First and foremost, there’s a new Text Chat system. The name gives a pretty clear indication of what it is – it’s a like a IM program for the PS3, allowing you hold conversations with up to 15 other players and engage in up to three different chats at once.

Text Chats run in the background, so you can keep chatting whilst you swap in and out of games, so it’s now a lot easier to organise your PSN mates into a multiplayer game and meet up.

There’s also a new way of sorting your friends list, which organises them according to their online status. You can also add attachments to messages of up to 3MB. Still next to useless, but a marked step up from the paltry 1MB it was before.

Finally, you can now choose to back up your videos purchased from the PlayStation Store to portable devices in order to free up space. Sounds great, if only we were allowed to, y’know, purchasevideos from the UK PlayStation Store. Oh well.

All in all though, it’s a decent upgrade for the PS3. The addition of Text Chat has solved one of the more pressing problems of trying to organise games with multiple friends, but without an equivalent voice chat system, getting on the phone is still going to be the quickest way. There’s always Firmware v2.80 though, eh?

Link: PS3 (via PlayStation.blog)