Today is the day of the big fall dashboard update for Xbox 360 owners. I have been lucky enough to be part of the preview for the last month so let me give you the real quick review of each of the new services.
**Facebook: ** The Facebook integration is pretty decent. It’s about the same as using Facebook on an iPhone or similar mobile device. The good is looking at your friends pictures on your big screen tv, the bad is trying to type updates or messages with a joystick. You will want a Chatpad or you can also plug in a usb keyboard.
Zune HD: An update to their own streaming video service. They claim 1080p quality video available to start watching in minutes, and from what I can see it’s pretty decent. I tested in on my older 1080i HDTV and it looked pretty good, and did start fast. The bad news is they aren’t cheap. Odds are you cable on demand service is cheaper than using the Zune HD system.
**Twitter: ** If you have only a few friends on twitter and you have a chat pad then perhaps this service will be ok for you. However, if you follow a few hundred or more (I’m over 1200) this interface is fairly useless. It shows only a few tweets at a time and updates far too slowly to be useful. Twitter is the real failure of this update, skip this.
**Last.Fm: ** The Last.FM integration is nearly perfect. It streams your music or other “stations” of music to you via xbox live at a pretty reasonable quality. Perfect for parties or just hanging out around the house pumping music through your home theater system. It however has one flaw. You can’t listen to Last.Fm and do anything else on your xbox. You can’t listen and play games, you can’t listen and twitter, you can’t listen and facebook.
So there you have it, rush home and update your xbox, then tell me what you think.
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