Microsoft Now Accepting Applicants For Xbox Live Dashboard Preview Program

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Microsoft’s sleek-looking new dashboard for the Xbox 360 is set to go live at some point this holiday season, but how would you like to check it out early? You can, provided you’re one of the few that gets accepted into their Xbox Live preview program, which opens to applicants today.

So what can you expect if you actually get into this preview program? Well, the new Xbox Live dashboard will once again be getting an entire visual overhaul with a new theme, but Microsoft’s main talking points about the new dashboard have boiled down to basically four major topics.

First up is enhanced Kinect support. If you’ve had issues navigating your dashboard with Kinect before, you’ll want to pay attention to this one, because Microsoft says that they’re “committed” to bringing voice to a total of 13 Xbox Live Markets by the end of this year – voice functionality for eight of those markets will be added with this dashboard update.

Once the update hits, you’ll also be able to use Bing to search through Hulu, Netflix, ESPN, and other features of Xbox Live. While Bing may not be most people’s first choice when it comes to search engines, the ability to search through the loads of content on Netflix and Hulu will be a welcome addition nonetheless.

Next up are beacons, which Microsoft says will alert your Xbox Live and Facebook friends that you want to play a particular game over Xbox Live. Tell your friends that you want to play a game with a beacon, and they’ll know that it’s okay to annoy you with requests to play that game. Finally – and this is the big one – this update will add cloud storage for your game saves and Xbox Live profiles. Of course, this will let you move your game saves to the cloud to have a back up or free up space on your hard drive, but most importantly, saving your Xbox Live profile to the cloud means no more gamertag recovery. Rejoice!

You can find all of details on how to get into this preview program over by clicking the source link below, and be sure to keep it here at TFTS – we’ll have more information about this dashboard update as Microsoft releases them!