Last time, there was a public beta of the update and anyone who had taken part for the beta update was not allowed to share or blog things about the update because certain things were confidential. Sharing would obviously get you banned from future participation of the future technology as I think.
- Refreshed Xbox 360 Dashboard – It brings out additional apps and services such as tuning to videos, movies, TV shows, music and even trying out more apps.
- Internet Explorer for Xbox – Just like the web browsers on other home consoles, Internet Explorer for Xbox 360 has modern support for HTML5. So how do you view online videos from video sharing sites like that? Well, that will be YouTube app but that requires gold subscription. And please don’t me that this is one technical offender which refuses to work on me again like an ignorant browser.
- Recommendations and Ratings – Recommendations are based on your views of movies, TV shows and even music that 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 within the Xbox community. Well, is there a reason not to have the Hotmail community as well so that people can try out the Xbox Live media services that are similar to ITunes even if they don’t own the Xbox 360 console?
- Pinning – Well, this is going to be quite weird and time consuming for Xbox 360 Dashboard. Sure, you can do this in Windows Phone and Windows 8 devices but on Xbox 360, it’s kind of weird for me. If there are various tabs on top of the screen that represent the respective stuffs, why do you need to pin stuffs in here?
- Recent Play – I believe that Quick Play was on late last year’s release of the new Xbox 360 Dashboard that will allow you to view the content you previously viewed.
- Enhanced Search – Last year, there was a voice support for Bing but I don’t use voice commands at all because it’s kind of embarrassing or perhaps I fear that it may have already attracted retards to say out such stupid things to the devices in which they don’t even understand. Perhaps there is nothing specially interesting that will attract more people to use voice commands but I’m sure that the otakus in Japan will be surprised to use the Siri-like technology on their Docomo Android devices. Sure, there may be mascots for the upcoming Windows 8 as well but I don’t know if you really want to buy that edition of the OS to check out the newer voice clips. This year, they added genre search to the list and Bing voice search now includes results for video across the Web including YouTube.
For Xbox SmartGlass, it will be coming in October 26th as well and that day will drive Microsoft hyper-busy for sure with thousands of sellers attempting to sell off the products with Microsoft’s future technology to the customers. It will be available for the tablets, computers and smartphones and feature key foundational experiences for interacting with your Xbox 360 such as dashboard and app navigation and Internet Explorer control. How do you use this as the bottom DS screen which displays additional information while you play games? In fact, you can even this app to remotely select the game features but I don’t know if you can remotely control the character by using this app to do so. By controlling the character in 3D games remotely, you are actually using that device as the controller for the console provided that your Xbox 360 and the device you’re using are connected to each other. If there’s an opportunity for this to happen…
One last thing, the Xbox Music app that is part of today’s Dashboard update will launch with free streaming on all Windows 8 devices on October 26th and Windows Phone 8 as devices arrive in the market. In the meantime, you can enjoy the new Xbox Music on your console while waiting for Windows 8 to be out.
