So the update landed today and is universally ‘a good thing’. MSN Messenger integration lets you chat slowly to friends on PC’s, mobiles etc. The dashboard is faster and the marketplace does look better placed in it’s own blade. Small things like seeing what disk is in the drive is also a nice touch. However it’s competition from the PS3 thats driving some of the more interesting updates.
A slew of new video codec’s are now supported meaning the 360 now matches the PS3 for video playback. The codec’s are covered well on Engadget highlighting what works and more importantly doesn’t. Two important factors when considering the 360 as a media player though. One, it can stream over a network which makes for easy downloading, extracting and storage elsewhere unlike the PS3. Two – it’s NOISY. Too noisy to be considered as a media player in my opinion.
Another, almost undocumented new feature is for VGA cable users. As detailed at DailyTech this finally allows VGA users to remove that washed out look that I always felt plagued VGA. It made me smile as I could never understand why people convinced themselves that VGA didn’t look washed out. Hey ho…fixed now.
Just Forza 2 demo and Halo 3 beta to look forward to now.