What do you know? Firmware 2.70 for PS3, announced yesterday, is out today. Go get it now if you have online gaming planned for later.

In addition to the new text chat features I already talk about, the Internet browser has also been enhanced with text copy and paste functionality (it’s about time); the music player has an added dynamic volume normalizer option (found under [Settings] > [Music Settings] > [Dynamic Normalizer]); and the game options menus now have the added selection of [Internet Search] to for easier means to search for info on games in your collection, directly through the PS3.

Some of these features I can’t imagine were things that people actually have been asking for, but still nice additions nonetheless.

Well, this April 1st turned out pretty good for gaming news. PlayStation Blog just let us know that Firmware 2.70 is coming out soon for the PlayStation 3.

The focus the PS Blog post is the addition of 16-user text chat. It looks to be similar to the type of text chatting people have gotten used to with the rise of AIM and Windows Live Messenger. Not as convenient as voice chat or voice messages, but still better than the ICQ, “short emails” type style of messages we’ve had up till now. The good news is that this new text chat will be accessible through the in-game XMB, so for all those fans of online games that don’t support communications of any kind, hey, you can talk to each other now.

For me though, the highlight of 2.70 is the ability to backup PlayStation Store bought movies and TV shows onto an external storage device. I recently went through the ordeal of copying all of my Watchmen animated graphic novel chapters, episodes of Family Guy, and Ghostbusters I onto my 2GB PSP Memory Stick, the only device I was allowed to copy the videos to. One or two at a time I copied them onto the portable to backup on my PC. It took a long time and was needlessly complicated, so 2.70 is great news for us who’ve bought a lot of videos and are running out of internal hard drive space.

2.70 will also let me re-copy my videos back on to my PS3 hard drive from my PSP to watch on my TV, something I thought I was giving up. Nice.

There’s a few other minor additions that I don’t think are worth mentioning, like Friends List sorting. Judging from the previous announced firmware updates, 2.70 should be out soon. Click on to see the full list of details from the PlayStation Blog.