The arrival of fall can be recognized in three ways – the shortening of daylight, the ripening of fruits and an Xbox 360 Dashboard update! And this year, fall seems to have arrived a little early, as Microsoft has rolled out its Xbox update already. The company has taken several initiatives to thrust up the sales count of Xbox 360 this year such as its price slash, Xbox Music and now the Xbox 360 Dashboard update.
Xbox 360, a console which is mostly used for gaming has loads of elements for entertainment as well. And with this update, the E-factor is just going to get better. Microsoft rolled out its update initially to the Gold members of Xbox Live and has claimed that the update will be made available for the rest of the users, later this month.
What’s the update for Xbox 360 Dashboard all about?
The update is mainly concerned with the dashboard and aims to offer its players with a revamped User Interface. The dashboard will have several updated Windows 8 style tiles, a different layout, exclusive sports content and an integrated channel for television and music.
Also, the update offers several customization features such as ‘pins’. People can now pin their favorite content such as videos, websites, television content, games and music to their dashboard. Also, Xbox Video emerges out to replace Zune video application with an intention to offer much variety in the collection of videos.
One of the personalization features offered by the device includes – content suggestion. This means that the console from now will show content based on your previous views, the content viewed by your friends and other trending and popular content prevailing over the internet. Moreover, the dashboard now has a rating system with which the viewers can rate the content they access and even retrieve ratings from Rotten Tomatoes.
The entry of Internet Explorer comes out as one of the sweet-shocks in this update. So, this means, we can now conveniently surf the internet and web content right from our television screens. Moreover, it supports HTML5 videos and has an on-screen keyboard which the people can use to enter URLs and other search terms to surf the web. They can access Facebook Twitter, YouTube and every other content of their choice simply using the Xbox.
One of the updates given to the console last year was the voice search feature. This feature allowed the Xboxers’ to search for their preferred content using their own voice via Kinect. With this update, Microsoft has gone a step further. This time, people can search for genres in videos using their voice such as comedy, drama and action apart from the basic searches.
This voice search is integrated with the internet, using which people can use their voice to search for any content across the World Wide Web. Furthermore, the voice search feature has now crossed barriers and is available to countries like Canada, Mexico, Japan, Germany, Austria, Ireland and a few more.
Finally, there is one last feature for the Xbox 360 which Microsoft will roll out alongside Windows 8. It is called the Xbox SmartGlass and will allow the gamers to share or stream their Xbox content over other devices such as Smartphones, tablets and televisions. What say!!
So, if September was the month dedicated to Apple fans, October is for Microsoftians! With such efforts thrown in over the launch of Windows 8, its series of tablets and Xbox 360 updates, the company sure seems to be on a roll. So, let’s wait and watch if October proves fortunate for Microsoft and find out if Microsoft’s reply to the prevailing gadgets in the market will be a mighty one!
Article by Vishal
Vishal Gaikar is a professional blogger from Pune, India. If you like this post, you can follow him on Twitter.
