Xbox fall dashboard preview goes live for all

The public beta is done. it’s now rolling out to the masses. Come on and get your IE on and pin things where you want them. I did love yelling “Xbox Quickplay” and have to get used to “Xbox Recent” but I can do it.

Here’s the important part of the official release:

In this update, free to all console owners, you will see the following features.

• Refreshed Xbox 360 UI. We’ve updated the UI with a few things, including an updated layout with more tiles, a combined TV & Movies page 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 also see Rotten Tomatoes ratings.
• Pinning. Pinning lets you to 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. 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 page gives you a list of movies, games 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, comedies, 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 12 new countries – France, Germany, Japan, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Italy, Spain, Austria, New Zealand, Switzerland and Ireland – and we’ve made it easier to connect to Xbox LIVE in English, French, Spanish and Chinese.

What about Xbox SmartGlass? That’s coming too, but not until Windows 8 launches on October 26th. When the Xbox SmartGlass app launches on tablets, PCs and smartphones, it will include key foundational experiences for interacting with your Xbox 360, such as dashboard and app navigation and Internet Explorer control, like text input, scrolling and pinch and zoom.

Yesterday, we shared all the details about Xbox Music, our brand new digital music service. Xbox Music begins rolling out today on Xbox 360, it will launch with free streaming on all Windows 8 PCs and tablets on October 26th and Windows Phone 8 as devices arrive in market. Xbox Music combines all the different ways people love to enjoy music, creating the ultimate all-in-one music service.

The 2012 Xbox LIVE update is beginning its rollout today and we expect all Xbox LIVE subscribers to have access to the update in the coming days.