Plenty of Xbox Live Gold users have been involved in the most recent beta for the 2012 dashboard update, but the final version of the upgrade will begin rolling out today.
Instead of unleashing the update all at once, Microsoft will be gradually giving subscribers access in multiple regions over the next week. Three million consoles will be reached worldwide in the first wave, with everyone else seeing the new features in the coming weeks.
Here’s a full list of the updates you’ll see on the new dashboard, provided by Major Nelson:
- Refreshed Xbox 360 UI. We’ve updated the UI with a few things, including an updated layout with more tiles, a combined TV & Movies page and, in the US, a Sports destination.
- Internet Explorer for Xbox. With Internet Explorer on Xbox, you can easily find and view internet content on the biggest screen in the house, including HTML5 videos.
- Recommendations and Ratings. Recommendations will allow you to discover new favorites, generated based on a number of variables including the content you previously viewed, what your friends are consuming and what is most relevant and popular with our Xbox community. You can also see Rotten Tomatoes ratings.
- Pinning. Pinning lets you to personalize the dashboard by saving your favorite movies, TV shows, games, music, videos and websites right to the home screen. It’s as easy as opening an app or a favorite movie and clicking “pin.”
- Xbox Video. Xbox Video offers hundreds of thousands of TV shows and movies for buying or renting in instant HD streaming.
- Recent. Previously called Quick Play, the Recent page gives you a list of movies, games or other types of content that you most recently accessed on the console.
- Enhanced Search. The last Xbox LIVE update brought Bing voice search to Xbox so you could use voice to search for movies, TV shows, actors, directors and artists. This year we added genre search to the list, so now you can search for action, comedies, romance, drama or sci-fi. Bing voice search now includes results for video across the Web, including YouTube.
- International Expansion of Voice Search. We’ve expanded our Kinect voice search capabilities to 12 new countries – France, Germany, Japan, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Italy, Spain, Austria, New Zealand, Switzerland and Ireland – and we’ve made it easier to connect to Xbox LIVE in English, French, Spanish and Chinese.
Look for these new features, along with support for Microsoft SmartGlass, in the next few weeks.
What do you think about all of the new features? Are you excited to take the new dashboard for a spin? Let us know by leaving a comment below!