New Xbox 360 Dashboard Beta Preview

As of today, those who signed up a little while ago and went trough the registration process for Microsoft’s “Preview Program” will notice, that as they turn on their xbox, they will be greeted with a message to download a new update for Microsoft’s new ‘Kinect ready’ Dashboard.

The first thing you’ll notice is how ‘straight’ everything is, no more curved edges now but rather sharp pointy angles instead. Right off the bat, the dashboard looks cleaner, neater, slick and generally more refined. Nothing has been added or changed as far as content is concerned and what you’ll also notice is how much more responsive the buttons seem to feel (no 3 second wait for the menu to appear when you press the ‘Guide’ button this time).

We’ve included a bunch of pics to give you a little preview of what to expect when Microsoft officially rolls it out to the masses around Fall time.

As we’ve mentioned already, its really only the aesthetics that have been given a shiny shiny makeover.

From here you get a different loading screen to normal (shown below), its only been added because we think it looks quite nice.

Notice the “Browse Preview” button (see above pic)…

The “Browse Preview” button takes you to a screen which allows you to watch a full-screen previews of each of the highlighted movies. We find this pretty sweet by the way.

Yes, that’s Assassin’s Creed 2 now available on “Games on Demand”, priced at £24.99 in the UK and around $40 in the US.

The search function for all games and videos has been re-touched as well and again, loading times between screens have been shortened.

I have more than ‘1’ friend just so you know.

We clicked on “Voice Collection” and were given the option to download a voice collection for ‘viva pinata’ but without the Kinect just yet, that was as far as we got. Again without the Kinect peripheral, “Kinect Viewer” didn’t do us much good apart from us being required to download some additional software updates.

The images above and below are fairly self explanatory.

A couple further things to note is that at the moment, the “Avatar Marketplace” and “Party Chat” are currently unavailable in the beta but have been assured that these and many more subtle changes will be made prior to this new update becomes widely available to the gaming public.

We’re still testing this out to try and see what other changes have been made and seeing how they compare to the original dashboard, we’ll keep you updated. Otherwise, overall we think the new dashboard looks great! Its faster, smoother and just nice to look at. We look very forward to see the finished product. Smiley faces all round we think.

Anyways, we’ve given you a snippet of what you can expect this Fall. What do you think so far? We’d like to hear from you.

Comments

  1. Looks great

  2. iDo Olivia Munn says

    im sure you have more than one firend lol this looks great

  3. When does the internet explorer release on the Xbox 360

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