Video: PS3 Firmware 2.70 Update

With the latest incremental improvement for the PS3, Sony has given us Text Chat - the ability to chat with up to 15 badass gamers using an on- or off-screen keyboard, participate in up to three chat rooms at once, in-game and out.

In addition, 2.70 brings enhancements to two more PS3 features:

Friends list on the XMB (XrossMediaBar)

• Sort your friends via their online status
• Attach larger files to the messages you send to your friends (file size will increase from 1MB to 3MB)

Video delivery service on PlayStation Store

• Video files you've purchased from the PlayStation Store can be backed up to an external storage device and then restored to PS3's internal hard drive for playback - so you can clear up space on your hard drive and then restore the video anytime in the future
• Videos you've purchased for PSP (PlayStation Portable) system can now be transferred to PS3 for playback

Friend sorting is all nice and good if you're into people and sharing and all that bunk, but what I'm really pleased to see is improved storage options. Not just because I'm constantly running out of gigabytage, but because increasingly huge internal hard drives aren't a one-shot solution to the future of downloadable media that Sony and Microsoft are hell-bent on building. The ability to shuffle and reorganize media files to and from external drives, particularly large video files, is a necessary feature set on the product roadmap laid out before us.