"I have had a chance to use the new Xbox Dashboard over the last week and the new Zune Music Marketplace has been by far my favorite. Docking your Zune to the TV worked but the UI was really awkward with that tiny remote. This solves everything as far as the 10 foot Zune experience in the living room. The Zune team has done a fantastic job with this and has really rounded out the 3 screen strategy for Zune Music. I will mention that this is all streaming and cloud based, you will need a Zune Pass to take advantage of this feature on Xbox. It will not connect to your PC or Home Server. It is unknown if or when that will happen, but for now, it is still a great addition to the Xbox."
An awesome overview video by my friend Grahm - there's lots of good stuff here, but guess what? It looks like it's mostly predicated on having a Zune Pass...which I still won't be able to get in Canada this year, and only some of Europe will be able to get. Sigh. Zune, you are so hard to root for right now!
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I've got the new update too and without saying too much to ruin the NDA, it's pretty awesome. The menus feel a lot more fluid, and it definitely benefited from the Zune-like UI tweaks. That said, the music library and player interfaces could really use an overhaul. For starters, it's incredibly tedious to wait for the massive amount of data about my library to stream over my connection, and it takes forever to switch songs, or scroll through a list to find them. It'd be really cool if they ported the Now Playing screen from the Zune Pass side of things to the music player, which has suffered from a set of boring WMP8-era visualizations since 360 v1.
...which has suffered from a set of boring WMP8-era visualizations since 360 v1.
What's funny though is that the visualizations on the Xbox 360 are 10x better than what we have as part of Windows Media Center, so I'll take this any day!
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The New Xbox 360 Dashboard with More Zune Goodness
Hybrid Mode
