Xbox 360 Dashboard gets first major facelift
While the Xbox 360 Dashboard and Xbox Live features are the most defining aspect of Microsoft’s mean green machine, it isn’t perfect as we all know. And Microsoft demonstrates what they’ve been doing to streamline their great online service and the Xbox Dashboard by announcing their first major facelift (finally allowing the 360 Live service to leave beta). The Spring Update, due in the next two weeks or so, is the first of what Microsoft hopes will be bi-annual major updates that they will incorporate to the 360 Dashboard and Xbox Live services to improve them in the future. A Fall Update is already in the works and will be more robust with more features and updates than this Spring Update.
So what’s new for this first update? Plenty.
- A new Media & Entertainment category has been added to the Marketplace menu. This allows you to search for movie trailers and short films, television promos, music videos, and more in their own category, instead of lumping them all together.
- The other marketplace categories have also been streamlined. For example, game demos can now be searched for by genre. Dashboard themes as well as Gamer Pictures now have their own section. And video game trailers & videos have been properly seperated from movie trailers.
- A new feature called Active Download will allow up to six downloads to be queued & prioritized in the download manager, freeing you up to continue browsing, listen to music or even play a game as the downloads continue in the background.
- While downloading, if an online game is initiated, the downloads will pause, therefore freeing up bandwith to prevent lag.
- Custom soundtracks are now remembered by the system and it is smart enough to stop the custom soundtrack play when a cut-scene in the game starts, resuming when the cut-scene has ended.
- Finished downloads can now be applied or videos can be played via a new pop-up window when a download completes.
- Marketplace videos now have fast forward & rewind controls (up to 16x speed), data retrieval for names of albums & individual tracks has been improved and a DVD can now be resumed from where you left off when the disc is stopped or taken out (a feature of most normal DVD players).
- Typically if a game is in the drive, then when the system is powered on the game will boot-up automatically. Well now you can set the system to always boot up to the Dashboard.
- Online Xbox Live updates include: when a player is idle, it will be known to everyone on their friend’s list, there will be an option to have a seperate Gamer Pic for friends and the general public which presemably is gearing up for the imminent release of the 360 camera, which this update supports even though the peripheral isn’t out till the fall.
