Microsoft sent out a stealth announcement early Tuesday morning, finally giving a date to an anticipated update to the Xbox 360 dashboard interface. The update will be free to all 360 owners and will get pushed out on December 6.
Major Nelson, a representative of Microsoft, confirmed the announcement of the new dashboard update on his blog this morning and provided some more details about what exactly would be included in the update. Bing search will definitely be integrated, as will enhanced voice and gesture controls for Kinect, allowing users to navigate the dashboard with that device.
Facebook integration is also included in the update as are Beacons. Beacons are a way to set your intention to play a game with friends. When friends come online that fit the Beacon they will have an indication that you want to play a game regardless of what you are currently doing on Live. An easy example is setting up a Beacon that you want to play Gears of War 3 and then going off to watch a movie on Netflix. This will let people on your friends list know that you want to play Gears and will jump out of your movie to do so if they setup a game.
Arguably the most significant feature in this update is the inclusion of cloud support. Microsoft is going to allow users to store Game Saves and Profiles in the cloud. This is a feature I have personally been begging for. Up until now if you wanted to move your Live Profile between two Xbox 360s, you had to move that Profile onto a USB flash drive and then restore it on the second console. Every time you wanted to move your profile this process had to be repeated. With the ability to store profiles in the cloud, I can easily hop between two 360s when my husband evicts me from the basement so he can watch football.
If this cloud storage for Profiles (and Game Saves) works as expected right out of the gate, it may give people who were on the fence about having two consoles in their house a good reason to pick up a second one over the holidays. PlayStation Network has had this feature for profiles since the start and Sony added the ability to store game saves in the cloud when PlayStation Plus debuted.
The release about this update also promises more new content for the dashboard over the next few months. "New, customized applications for television, movies, internet videos, sports and music will begin rolling out from world-leading providers in more than 20 countries." That content will likely be the channels associated with some of the TV content partnerships that Microsoft has announced previously.
Do you care about this update? Are you interested in any new features in particular? Let us know what you think in the comments.
