14 DAY TRIAL // Sony is good at building up excitement. On Monday, news leaked that it was readying an announcement related to the PlayStation brand and a lot of ears were listening when, on Tuesday, Sony said that it was cutting the price of the PlayStation 2 to 99 dollars and, respectively, 99 Euro. Now, the company is jumping at the chance of revealing that it will be introducing a fresh version of the PlayStation 3 firmware, even if the announcement does not say when it is set to arrive to gamers.
The feature that Sony is highlighting is the new Text Chat, which should allow players to communicate quickly with their friends from the PlayStation Network list. There is a limit of 15 friends you can talk with at the same time and Sony says that PlayStation 3 owners are free to use the Wireless Keypad, the on screen keyboard or any other input device they are using. The Text Chat function stays active as you play games and there is an option to enter up to three chatrooms at the same time.
Alongside this communication-oriented feature, Sony is adding an option to see the Friends list you have in the XcrossMediaBar and an option that allows all players to sort their friends based on their online states. The size of files that you can send to another gamer has been increased to 3MB.
There have also been some options added to the video delivery service of the PlayStation 3. If a user is low on hard drive space, he can take all the video content that he got from the PlayStation Store and place it on an external drive so that it is stored for later use. It can be transferred back to the hard drive at any time without any problems. Also, the video content that has been bought for the PlayStation Portable can be loaded and played on the PlayStation 3.
The maker is not saying when firmware 2.70 is set to arrive, but the announcement means that those who own a Sony home console will not have to wait too long.