Uniform, streamlined
Microsoft has already said that any dashboard refresh for the Xbox Series X won’t be drastic. That’s because Microsoft has spent the past few years trying to unify the Xbox experience, and that means making sure that everything looks familiar across all devices.
This video is a visual elaboration on that concept. It shows the upcoming UI configuration for the Xbox Series X, Xbox One, PC, and Android. It’s more or less the same because that’s the connected ecosystem appeal that Microsoft is gunning for.
There are more interesting details than just the general aesthetic of it all. A significant portion of the video is spent explaining how much faster the Xbox Series X is with regard to general speed. Booting is 50 percent quicker and returning from a game is about 30 percent quicker. The Xbox operating system underwent a streamlining of sorts, as Xbox Experience principal program manager Jonathan Hildebrandt explains that all this snappiness actually requires 40 percent less RAM than before.
There’s a new mobile Xbox app in the works too. Microsoft has resigned itself to the fact that consoles aren’t great for text communication. This revamped app will better integrate the social component of Xbox gaming onto mobile. That extends to sharing too. Whenever you capture a screenshot or video clip on Xbox, it’ll immediately push to your phone so that you can share it to social from there. It’s a much better process than my current method which is: Capture media, wait for it to upload to the Xbox Live cloud, open the Xbox app on my PC, download it from Xbox Live to my PC, and then share to social media.
All this should launch in November alongside the Xbox Series X.
