Saturday, October 20, 2012

Xbox 360 2012 Xbox LIVE Update now Live


This week Microsoft released the 2012 Xbox LIVE Update, which is a mandatory system update for the Xbox 360 console.

You can read the full details on Major Nelson's site here, but generally speaking:

- They cleaned up the horrible Dashboard layout introduced in last year's update and made it ever so slightly less horrible with more ads
- Internet Explorer for Xbox has been added, allowing you to surf the web from your console provided you have an Xbox LIVE Gold membership
- Different Channels now Recommend other products for you to buy; so essentially, even more ads.  Heck, even if you do a search via Bing, ads are in the results
- You can now Pin your most used games and aps to the Pin submenu on the Home Channel
- Zune Marketplace has been re-branded to Xbox Video
- The crappy Facebook and Twitter apps are gone

Personally, I find this all hugely underwhelming and generally just a continued screw up over what used to be a good interface (NXE).  The amount of ads, even for Gold members, is also pretty insulting.

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