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Wednesday, December 7, 2011

New Xbox Live

Alright so earlier today the new Xbox Live update was rolled out to 360 owners nationwide and now that I've had some time to test it out its time to do a review. Right from the start its apparent this is a completely new Xbox experience. Everything looks beautiful to be honest. The new metro UI style is really doing something for the system and the clean cut tiles give just the right amount of information. I have a blank black background which in my opinion fits really well with the overall color scheme but that's just me.

First things first, the new home screens. There are currently eight tabs on the welcome screen which will be Bing, Home, Social, video, Games, Music, Apps, and Settings. The Bing tab should be self explanatory as it will allow you to perform search actions on content located within the Xbox setup. Your new home tab will give you the option to play whatever disc you have inserted, access to quickplay any downloaded games, top news of the day, top video, and an advertisement.

Next up on our list of tabs is the Social feature which is nice simple and basic only showing who is online and giving options for Friends, Social Apps and to sign in or out. Video, Game, and Music tabs should be easy to figure out and as of now are truly that simple. On each tab there is a advertisement and top slideshow for the topic at hand and that's it. The overall theme here is definitely simplicity and that is spot on with what i'm seeing.

Apps have been a big hit lately with pretty much every type of device and now the Xbox is no different. There is a dedicated apps tab now on the homescreen and within the near future you will be able to download things such as Youtube and Iheartradio. I assume more are on the way but its nice to see a console platform going the way of smartphones. Honestly my first thought on this whole upgrade was that the Xbox is becoming a smart TV like Apple and Google tv setups.

The only other real thing I wanted to talk about today was Cloud storage and that's just because Microsoft finally got up their butts and has started offering users 512MB of storage for game saves. This will be helpful for people who travel a lot or have multiple consoles as they may now migrate to any other location and have everything ready for them.

So overall I definitely am enjoying what has been done to the system and can't wait to test out these applications. What do you think? leave your amazingly awesome comments down below and as always, have a great day!?

4 comments:

  1. Loving the new update. So far no problems. This is a great article but you should use more pictures.

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  2. Thanks for the comment and yes I agree. More pictures would make for a more interesting experience.

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  3. So basically Microsoft is copying GoogleTV? I don't mind though, YouTube on the 360 has been wanted since it came out.

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  4. I think the new unified metro UI style is going to be a nice addition to Microsoft products

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