The new update for the Xbox Dashboard starts rolling out today with many improvements and additions.
I have been using the new Dashboard for the past couple of months on the Beta preview and it is a good improvement on the mess that is currently on the majority of Xbox’s at the moment. The tabs are reorganised with Games now being closer to the starting position. The Pin feature is a welcome addition, it allows you to pin your favourite games and apps which are two button presses away on the starting tab. Overall everything feels a bit more user friendly and faster, especially if you have a lot of games installed – it now takes a second or two to populate instead of minutes for some people. Here is the main list of changes courtesy of Major Nelson:
- 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.
The update will be available to download starting today and over the next few days. Don’t worry if you do not get the update straight away, it will happen!
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