New Xbox 360 Dash Update Starts Rolling Out Today

If you’ve been a part of the closed beta, some of this might not be news to you, but for everybody else, today is the day the new Xbox 360 dashboard update rolls out, with a host of new features to boot.

As is the norm with these updates, don’t get angry if you don’t get it the first time you boot up your Xbox 360 today, as to ensure a stable and reliable roll-out, Microsoft will operate a gradual deployment throughout the week. This update doesn’t contain SmartGlass quite yet, as that won’t be available until October 26, when Windows 8 launches, but the list of features is impressive, nonetheless, as below:

• Refreshed Xbox 360 Dashboard. We’ve updated the UI with a few things, including an updated layout with more tiles, a combined TV & Movies channel 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 now rate content yourself and also see Rotten Tomatoes ratings.
• Pinning. Pinning lets you 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. Formerly called Zune Video Marketplace, 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 view gives you a list of movies, games, apps 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, comedy, 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 9 new countries – Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Italy, Spain, Austria, and Ireland.

Don’t forget, Xbox Music also launches today, which you can read all about here. Pinning sounds interesting to us, but we’d love to hear what about this new update interests you – so let us know in the comment section below, and let us know if you’ve got the update yet. You can log-in to with Twitter, Facebook or just good old fashioned Disqus.