Metro Dashboard review

Metro Dashboard Review
December 6th, 2011 marks yet another turning point in the life of the Xbox 360. And again, it brings some pretty awesome changes. If you are yet to get it, do an Xbox LIVE network test, or restart your Xbox.
The new dashboard is inspired by, yet again, the Metro design that can be found in Windows Media Center, Zune, Windows Phone 7, and Windows 8. It brings with it a batch of new features that are meant to enhance your experience within the dashboard.

Beacons are a revamped feature that was in existence on the 360 before. When you start a beacon, it will notify you when one of your friends sets a beacon of the same game or when someone begins to play that particular game or app. Unfortunately, this can be particularly annoying as these notifications can’t be turned off. Like say, I want to know who comes on, but I don’t care who plays what, I can’t turn those off.

Live TV is a new section that brings something that a lot of us really want. Live TV. It brings streaming internet TV to your Xbox. But depending on where you live, only certain providers are there. But that is nothing new. Under this section, you can find the provider apps. Things like SyFy or MSNBC apps can be found here. But this isn’t like your cable box. Comcast has no plans to make your Xbox a dedicated cable box like AT&T does with U-Verse, instead you will get access to a limited selection of On Demand stuff. Kinda sucks. But oh well.

To those Kinect owners out there, you no longer have that lame Kinect hub. The Dashboard and the Kinect Hub are now are the same thing. And you don’t have a limitation on what you want to use to get places. If you want to play Battlefield 3 and already have the disk in, all you have to say is,”Xbox, Home, Play Battlefield 3.” Alternatively you can use your body or a controller. Now, like everything else in this update, there is a limitation to the awesomeness. With this new update, there isn’t an update to the native media player as you can’t use Kinect to pause, stop, or play your DVD’s or music on your Xbox. Or even change settings.

Cloud Saves are a new awesome thing that allows you to take all of your saved games with you, without a need for a memory unit or flash drive. All you have to do is move them over like it is a memory unit. And a few minutes later it is uploaded to your cloud saves. This is a neat feature but in every game it asks every time if you want to load from your hard drive or the cloud. And that gets pretty annoying. Now, I haven’t been able to try to play a game on another console yet, but when I do, I will update this section.

As it is a Microsoft product, they have to somehow integrate Bing into it. But this isn’t really an annoying way to do it. Actually, it is incredibly helpful. I no longer have to browse through a ton of menus to get to a game in the marketplace. And like everything on this new dashboard, it can be controlled by voice. A simple command,”Xbox, Bing Rock Band”, will bring up all of the Rock Band games and a second simple,”Rock Band 3” will take you directly to it in the Marketplace. But it isn’t limited to just the marketplace. It is integrated into everything. Netflix will bring up movies and TV shows, Zune will bring up music and music videos, Comcast will display anything that is on demand, and YouTube will show its results too.

All in all, this update has turned out fantastically. The dashboard has a sleek new look and has some awesome potential. But it hasn’t quite made it up to par with others. So I am not disappointed yet, but hopeful that Microsoft will fix those things and add some more customizability. But this is definitely a boost to those who own a Kinect.