Xbox 360 Update for the Spring Coming on May 19th - The UpStream

Xbox 360 Update for the Spring Coming on May 19th

posted Sunday May 15, 2011 by Nicholas DiMeo

Xbox 360 Update for the Spring Coming on May 19th

Coming off the heels of benefiting from the Hulu Plus service rolling into the Xbox 360 yard, the Xbox, as per usual, is staying in the news. This week, being in the media certainly helps as we have gotten a hold of a couple of slides from a Microsoft tech support employee that hints to a new Dashboard update that will start to hit the consoles on May 19th.

From the docs, we should expect to see six different rollouts of the update from May 19 through May 30, which probably means heavy users and previous beta testers will get their hands on it first, which seems to be the typical deployment plan for the 360.

What's included? A bunch of cool stuff that's waiting for you after the break to find out about. We have the documents, too.

The update will include a lot of back-end things, like the unannounced January update, but will also boast a more interesting option. We will be seeing PayPal making its way over to international waters to be used to pay for points, content and other services on the Xbox 360.

Also, we will see support for the XGD3 format that we talked about last month, which adds 1GB of capacity to the Xbox discs and adds some additional layers of lame copy protection.

However, one of the more important and anticipated features that we've been waiting to see, Avatar Kinect, won't arrive until May 27th. That's the thing we heard about at CES that gives you more than 15 virtual rooms to chat with 7 of your friends over Xbox LIVE. You remember, right? We were all excited because the Kinect would now be able to track and utilize not only your hand, arm and head movements but also your facial expressions, so when you laugh, your Avatar should, too.

Unfortunately, even after the November update, there's still no word about the awful tiles and movement designs on the dashboard itself. So we'll still have to deal with a mild case of nausea and confusion each time we quickly scroll through our options.

Here's the slides below, compliments of Joystiq.

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