Live Messenger coming to Xbox 360

Microsoft has announced that the spring Xbox 360 Dashboard update, coming in the week of May 7, will include Live Messenger features enabling Xbox users to chat with friends on Messenger.

Using the new Windows Live Messenger functionality, Xbox 360 users will be able to chat with up to six people at one time while playing games, listening to music or watching movies. Live Messenger users will also see instantly if their online buddies have Gamertags.

When the update goes live users will be able to use a virtual keyboard or a USB keyboard, but later in the summer Microsoft will be launching a QWERTY text-input device that will snap onto the Xbox 360 controller. It looks kind of like a small keyboard you’d find on a PDA.

The spring update will include a host of other tweaks, additions and fixes:

• Improved Achievement pop-ups, offering the name of the achievement and the gamerscore value.
• Enhanced family settings to enable different defaults for video and voice chat.
• A new Live Marketplace blade giving users quicker access to the content they seek, be it games or movies.
• Quickly see what Xbox Live Arcade games your friends are playing and join them in a game, and with expanded comparison tools it will be easier than ever to work out who is the best and send that all important boasting message.
• A new progressive download ability makes it possible to watch, pause, rewind and resume a video even when it is still being downloaded from Xbox Live Marketplace.
• Improved background downloading will enable the console to shut down after all downloads have been completed.
• Added support for H.264 video (up to 10 Mbps peak, Baseline, Main, and High profiles with 2 channel AAC LC) and MPEG-4 Part 2 video support (up to 5 Mbps peak, Simple Profile with 2 channel AAC LC.)

Look out for the update beginning the week of May 7.