If you’ve been living under a rock for the last couple of days or weren’t in the position to visit a games website, you might have missed the great news about Firmware 2.40, which allows you to access the XMB in-game and the addition of trophies. This firmware has just gone live and apart from those two features, there’s a bit more, head inside for the full list of changes.

Below is the official changelog taken from Sony’s Network update website. What’s not mentioned in this list are a few changes in the Playstation Store. Previously some thumbnails were loading really slow, and this can be very annoying for impatient people like yours truly. This seems to be fixed now and browsing through all the stuff in the store seems to go a lot smoother. Another change is the list view of items instead of small icons, this way more information about a certain item is described. Check out this post to see a few videos of the update.

Overall

• You can now see the system clock on the XMB™ screen. The date and time that were set under [Settings] > [Date and Time] are displayed.
• When using a keyboard, you can now clear the entire text entry field at once.
• The Users icon is now displayed when you press the PS button for an operation that cannot be performed.

Users

• You can now turn off the PS3™ system from the XMB™ screen using the [Turn Off System] option.

Settings

• You can now set the PS3™ system to turn off automatically after updating the system software.
• [Reassign Controllers] and [Controller Vibration Function] have been added as options under [Accessory Settings].

Photo

• You can now print images from a playlist.
• You can now sort items that are grouped in a folder by month or year using the [Film Date date down] or [Film Date date up] options.

Music

• You can now use a mini-size control panel while playing music.
• You can now play music content encoded in MP3 Surround format. (MP3 Surround can only be used when playing music content in Linear PCM format.)

Video

• You can now use the [Frame Noise Reduction] and [Block Noise Reduction] settings for video content that is saved on the hard disk or storage media.
• You can now play upscaled video content that is saved on the hard disk or storage media. When the video content is played, it is upscaled automatically to match the screen size.
• Upscaling of Blu-ray Disc (BDAV) video content is now supported.
• For DTS playback on DVD-Video and Blu-ray Disc media, DTS-ES and DTS 96/24 for DVD-Video and DTS-ES Matrix for Blu-ray Discs are now supported. (”DTS” is a trademark of DTS Inc.)

Game

• The procedure for quitting PLAYSTATION®3 format software has been changed.
• You can now collect trophies in games that support the trophy feature.

Game Network

• [Search] has been added as an option in the browse mode menu of the Internet browser.

Friends

• The number of Friends who can be added to a Friends list has been increased from 50 to 100.
• The [Information] screen has been redesigned and renamed as [Profile].

In-game XMB and Trophies

If your Playstation 3 is connected to the internet, just turn it on and download the update. Enjoy! Do you like all the new features? Let us know in the comment section below.