Hands on with the big Xbox dashboard update
Yeah, so what, we'll admit the first thing we did this morning after we wrote up those two Apple posts was update our Xbox 360 -- it's a helluva job, but somebody's got to do it. Here are a few short hands on impressions of what it is you all can expect when you get home from work later today and turn that puppy on to check out the new junk. So here we are, Xbox dashboard 2.0.2857.0, enjoy.
Well, the first thing we did is hit the settings. Namely because we're sick and damn tired of booting into the games that are left in the drive.
So we turned that off.
We also noticed the Xbox Live Vision camera settings menu -- wonder what forthcoming device that could possibly correspond to.
Yeah, not a lot we can do in there, but we like that you can set it up to work best with your room type and lighting source.
Another we hadn't seen before (or didn't think we'd seen before) is the remote menu, which allows you to use one of your pre-existing Media Center remotes to control your Xbox. Not bad if you already had one and didn't want to buy a new remote just for your Xbox, but ever since we've have our Media Center and Xbox set up next to one another, whenever we hit the Green Button it turns on both -- and that's just no good. After engaging this our Media Center remote stopped controlling our 360, which was something we'd long wanted.
As advertised, blades in the dash have more options for easier navigation.
Looks like XBLM was having some issues today -- we must've gotten this error a good three, four times.
The performance-optimized download queue was the thing we were most stoked about -- as we're sure most everyone else was, as well. Yep, just your almost-usual download dialogue, but you can take it straight to the active download list.
Which can also be access from the XBLM front door.
As we saw before, it looks something like this. We kinda wish it would do simultaneous downloads, but we'll live.
You also get a nice popup letting you know when your download is done. Thanks!
Browsing around the system today and XBLM, everything seemed about normal. Pretty snappy, no major slowdowns (but a couple of minor crashes on Live, like above). Obviously we didn't get a chance to hunt around the other 120-some-odd Dashboard "features," but we likes what we see, and we only wish we had some of these updates much earlier than today.
