Xbox: The New Dashboard

As most of you gamer types know or anyone that watches TV regularly, Microsoft has been advertising the new Dashboard for some time. They show in commercials. Here is the video of the E3 preview:

 Now that it is finally out I can talk about how excited I am about this. So I will talk about my favorite features here, and please, tell me your favorites below as well <3

Motion/voice controlled Dash: This is super exciting for me! I have the kinect and can't play it much currently because the room it is in is too small for it to be used. Now, I can start using the voice control to sign in, start movies, or browse through marketplaces.

Cloud Saved Games: Has anyone besides me ever lost a USB drive that had their game saves on it that they took to a friends house? Don't lie, you know you have, or you've forgotten it and don't get it back for a week. Now, with cloud saved games, you get 512MB of storage space on the Xbox servers to store saves and you can access them on any console that you sign into.

Download Profile: I know I personally HATE recovering my profile over and over again when I go to one friends house. Putting it on a USB was the only way to avoid that previously. Now... you can download your profile onto a console AND IT STAYS THERE! As is, all your other profiles elsewhere are not rendered useless. Now, sound like a security issue? Yeah, but there is a resolution!

Password at Sign-in: You can now require your WLID (Windows Live ID) password at sign in! This will prevent access to your account as a whole. You can choose to require it on all consoles, just the console your on, or all consoles but the one you are on currently. Fantastic! Before you could prevent people from signing into LIVE, but not your entire profile. Love this soooo much

Beacons: Ever wanted to play a game with friends, but they are all busy, or not currently online? Yeah, me too. Well, you can now setup a Beacon that will be on xbox, and you can share on facebook saying "I would like to play ___________ with friends" They can then come online and invite you to a game, or bring you into a party in order to start a game.

Sharing Achievements: Okay, so gamerscore is all bragging rights. Well, now you can post achievements to facebook and brag to everyone you know :D Congrats on a new ability to annoy friends and family. Enjoy it, but remember with great power comes great responsibility.


There are more fun little things that come with the new dashboard like Bing search, an updated look and feel, more apps, tv on xbox, tv on demand and more uses for kinect. These are just my favorites though. So this is me, signing off on here for now. Have a good one guys!

When your avatar sleeps.... you count SHEEP!