New Xbox 360 dashboard update starts hitting consoles from today
Words by: Gregg Remmer | Posted: 7 months ago | Filed under: News.
Those of you who are not already enjoying the new dashboard in the public beta may be the owner of one of the 3 million consoles being affected today by the staggered rollout of the new features. As always, Major Nelson was on hand to give us the low-down on what we can expect from the update, of which can be found below.
- Refreshed Xbox 360 Dashboard. We’ve updated the UI with a few things, including an updated layout with more tiles, a combined TV & Movies channel and, in the US, a Sports destination.
- Internet Explorer for Xbox. With Internet Explorer on Xbox, you can easily find and view internet content on the biggest screen in the house, including HTML5 videos.
- Recommendations and Ratings. Recommendations will allow you to discover new favorites, generated based on a number of variables including the content you previously viewed, what your friends are consuming and what is most relevant and popular with our Xbox community. You can now rate content yourself and also see Rotten Tomatoes ratings.
- Pinning. Pinning lets you personalize the dashboard by saving your favorite movies, TV shows, games, music, videos and websites right to the home screen. It’s as easy as opening an app or a favorite movie and clicking “pin.”
- Xbox Video. Formerly called Zune Video Marketplace, Xbox Video offers hundreds of thousands of TV shows and movies for buying or renting in instant HD streaming.
- Recent. Previously called Quick Play, the Recent view gives you a list of movies, games, apps or other types of content that you most recently accessed on the console.
- Enhanced Search. The last Xbox LIVE update brought Bing voice search to Xbox so you could use voice to search for movies, TV shows, actors, directors and artists. This year we added genre search to the list, so now you can search for action, comedy, romance, drama or sci-fi. Bing voice search now includes results for video across the Web, including YouTube.
- International Expansion of Voice Search. We’ve expanded our Kinect voice search capabilities to 9 new countries – Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Italy, Spain, Austria, and Ireland.
If you haven’t been lucky enough to be in the first batch of updates then you can expect to see a prompt on your Xbox in the coming days.
The post from the Major additionally states that Xbox Music is also rolling out from today and will offer free streaming on Windows 8 PCs and tablets on the 26th October when the operating system launches, along with the release of Xbox SmartGlass.
About Gregg Remmer
Struggles to finish any game that isn't Portal and loves nothing more than a little bit of nostalgia, which is evident from his ONLY 1k'd game - TMNT
