Review: Xbox 360 Add-ons

Microsoft has for the longest time said that they saw the Xbox 360 as more than a gaming machine. With the Xbox Live marketplace having: music, movie, games that are both small and large in terms of scope and scale, and other downloads, the 360 strives to be the media center of the family room. This role is now expanding with four separate applications.

First up is Twitter. I will be first to admit that I am always two days late and five dollars short when it comes to social aspects to the Internet. I only have had a Twitter account for less than six months, and that was mostly because I have a lot of free time at work and my iPod Touch has several apps that let me check in on random people. It’s mostly a time-killer than any real function I plan on using. That being said, Twitter on the 360 is functional. Typing can be a bit tricky if you don’t have the keypad attachment for the controller. So far there is no option to auto-tweet achievements or sending screenshots through Twitter, but I am sure at some point that will become an option. Right now it’s a novelty. The program is isolated in the sense you currently cannot do anything in game with Twitter.

Facebook is also added to the 360 system. Like Twitter, I am also very new to having an account. Mostly I signed up because a few online friends already had it and it was an easy way to keep up. Like Twitter, it’s completely separate from the gameplay. A quick 5MB download gets you, basically, Facebook-lite. Your friends lists show up like normal, and photo galleries load quickly and in full screen. On the whole the application runs well. Again, no direct game-Facebook interface, which is a good thing. I haven’t had much of a chance to work with it, mostly because I really don’t get into social networking sites, but I can see how this would appeal to some people. You can do in game screen shots and add them to your Facebook gallery, but I haven't had any luck getting that to work.

Next up is the revamp/update to the Xbox Live marketplace. Now it’s called the Zune marketplace. The entire video marketplace layout has been re-structured, so it might be a little harder to find things. The first thing I did notice was that something serious was changed on the Xbox Live architecture. Previously, when I downloaded a video from the marketplace, it took a lot longer than I thought it should. A 50MB file would take about 20-30 minutes to download. Now that same file download was almost instant. Before the change, Microsoft was talking about streaming HD, and that never made sense to me. The bandwidth requirements for something like that seemed beyond the current architecture. I was seriously wrong on that. I don’t have a Netflix account, so I don’t know if that speed translates to the movie service.

Last up, and certainly not least, is Last FM. This is an online music radio service. With a very large library of music, I was very impressed with this program. Music streamed quickly with very high quality and no buffering issues. I was able to switch from song to song with only a three to five second buffer before the next song launches. An option to turn photos on and off is included, which threw me at first. When you play music, the screen is filled with an image slideshow of the current band playing that is quite interesting. There is a musician search feature, and I was able to find more than a few bands I didn’t think I would. Last FM also has a matching feature, so it takes what you are listening to and has similar artists and/or sound styles to introduce you to bands you might not have heard of. I can see a big use for this feature. If you are in a party setting, instead of setting up a radio with endless commercials or trying to manage a stack of CDs to set up a playlist, you can just fire up Last FM and have the visual of the band slideshow along with the music playing.

The thing that really surprised me is that none of these features are automatic. I first thought there was something wrong with my 360 when I started it up and didn’t get the message of an update I needed to download. Every feature, even the Zune marketplace, is its own separate function that you have to get from a download individually. So if you don’t want and/or don’t have Twitter or Facebook, it’s not something you “have” to have on your system.