- WINDOWS PHONE 8 XBOX FRIENDS LIST INCOMPLETE UPDATE
- WINDOWS PHONE 8 XBOX FRIENDS LIST INCOMPLETE FULL
- WINDOWS PHONE 8 XBOX FRIENDS LIST INCOMPLETE WINDOWS 8
The results were then pared down further, "Xbox, show movies," filtered out the TV, game, and music content, leaving only Bat-flicks to choose from. Our host showed us the ropes by using the update's new search feature, kicking off a content crawl by saying "Xbox, Bing Batman." Sure enough, the screen was soon filled with a multitude of Bat-content, pulling up movies, games, TV shows, and even a soundtrack. Controllers and arm waves are fine, but there's nothing like telling a computer (or game console, as it were) what to do, Star Trek style, and have it actually do it. Sometimes lifting a finger is just too much work, even without a remote - good thing then that the new Dash is willing to lend an ear to your bossy commands. From here, the new Dash's Kinect controls look to be a solid answer to our lost remote woes. The natural, intuitive controls are very much built off of experiences we're already familiar with, and feels accordingly comfortable. The simple gestures we saw were little more than swiping back and forth across the screen to switch categories or air-pawing at a tile to select an option - it wasn't much, but it was enough to once again remind us of an over-sized tablet interface. Lucky for them, Microsoft seems to have kicked the Kinect hub out of its exclusive little corner and made it play nice with the rest of the Dashboard: gesture controls now work almost entirely across the board. Sure, you can still navigate the new Dash with the standard Xbox 360 controller, but there's over 10 million Kinect owners out there just dying to go Minority Report all over this new interface. Those of us who weren't sold on the Kinect sensor as a video game controller had to at least admit that it would nice to couch surf without having to look all over the living room for that danged remote - and the Dashboard's deeper Kinect integration takes us one giant leap closer to that lazy dream of clicker-free TV.
WINDOWS PHONE 8 XBOX FRIENDS LIST INCOMPLETE FULL
Although the new look failed to pique our interest at E3, seeing it in action makes all the difference - it's sleeker, more efficient, and a full Xbox realization of Microsoft's Metro look. It's almost as if the design team simply tipped a Windows Phone on its side and tossed in a dash of old-school Zune for good measure.
WINDOWS PHONE 8 XBOX FRIENDS LIST INCOMPLETE WINDOWS 8
The new UI invokes a tablet-esque interface, and feels very much like how we imagine a Windows 8 tablet might. "My Xbox," for instance, is now "Home," and sports a handy "Quickplay" button similar to the current Dash's "Quick Launch," listing not only recently played games, but apps (such as Netflix) as well. Some of the familiar categories have been renamed, and are sprinkled with new features. A row of categories headline the top of the screen, placing games, social, and other sections between the new Bing search feature and the console's settings page. Most section layouts consist of a single large tile cycling through "spotlight" content surrounded by an assortment of smaller tiles hosting the category's primary functions or popular apps. The entirety of a category's options are upfront and ripe for the picking, without the need to sort through a lengthy list of options. Despite the new layout's single-screen confinement, it feels more refined than cramped.
WINDOWS PHONE 8 XBOX FRIENDS LIST INCOMPLETE UPDATE
Whereas the current dashboard spreads your channel content across a row of large panels, the fall update allots only a single screen of real-estate per category. The pseudo-cross-bar navigation of today's Xbox 360 dashboard is gone, replaced by a logical extension of last year's dashboard update - that is, more Metro.