Microsoft releases a new Xbox 360 dashboard update to all Xbox users in this week, and Xbox uses can enjoy much more contents apart from games. The Xbox console's various channels now headline the top of the screen, listing the familiar "games," "music" and "video" sections between the new Bing search feature and the console's settings page. A few of the channels have been renamed -- "My Xbox" is now "home" and a very Zune-esque "social" replaces "friends." Core content hasn't changed much, but the way you access it has, with yesterday's single-file tiles retired in favor of single page Metro layouts, packing more than twice as much information on screen as the previous Dashboard.
The contemporary update keeps the Metro, heavy on typography and flat squares and live tiles and swiping, the Metro lives in Xbox, Windows Phone 7 and the upcoming Windows 8, it's a fresh yet familiar take on UI. Metro looks so good and easy-to-use whether you already know how to use it or you've never used it before. With Metro on Xbox, Microsoft can elegantly pack more contents onto one screen. A horizontal menu details the various categories on your Xbox (Games, Video, Music, Apps, etc.) with each category getting its own hub organized neatly with independent tiles of content.
In addition, the Xbox companion application is powered by Microsoft’s Bing search engine. The search functionality allows you to search the entire Xbox Live catalog of TV shows, movies, music, games and apps on your Windows Phone device. Once you’ve searched a title, you can find out more information about it, and launch it on your Xbox from your handset, controlling it with the usual play, pause, rewind and fast forward functions we’re all used to. By bundling all digital subscriptions and content through the Xbox 360, Microsoft wants to make sure your gaming console is at the heart of your entertainment center. Xbox Live subscribers and subscribers of these digital services won't have access to much in the way of new content, but it will all be centralized in one location. Microsoft has also baked in deeper voice control of the console for consumers using its Kinect sensor. The Kinect is better known as motion-controller that gives gamers the ability to use gestures to play games. But Kinect also has a microphone array in it. When Kinect debuted last year, gamers could use their voice for some limited voice-controlled navigation.
In a word, the move is part of a growing effort by media companies to bring some 21st-century pizzazz to the experience of navigating and watching television, a medium that is largely watched using traditional remote controls and set-top boxes that have changed little in the past 10 years. Xboxes are already 57 million households worldwide, so the decision to update such a gigantic installed base is a shrewd move on Microsoft’s part. Nonetheless, it remains to be seen whether the Xbox can juice the Windows Phone platform, which could use a serious boost in adoption.
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