Microsoft continues to fling Xbox One firmware updates at us, month after month, adding features that most gamers hoped would have come right at launch. But hey, beggers with a $500 system in their houses can be choosers, because they have been asking members of the community to try out early system updates and give feedback, and thanks to those enterprising souls there's new UI updates on the way.
One of the biggest is the inclusion of notifications to see when friends sign into Xbox Live, a feature that I'm fairly certain was part of the Xbox Live experience from the beginnning. Game saves will now have a progress bar that shows you the status of your game saves, and which games or apps have been updated recently. Perhaps most importantly are the Kinect's updates, which include improvements to the voice and motion controls of the system.
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Here's the full list of improvements from their newswire.
-Game and app saves and updates. A game save progress bar will show you the status of your game saves. You will also be able to easily tell what games and apps are being updated or have been updated recently.
-Friends improvements. Notifications will be added to see when favorites and friends sign in to Xbox Live. This actually was one of the most frequently requested features from the first preview wave and we made it a priority to include it in the April update. Also, friends who are in multiplayer will be identified in the friends list. We’ll also add the ability to view friends’ most popular apps.
-Kinect voice and motion improvements will continue to fine tune the quality and reliability of Xbox One commands.
-Improved GameDVR video quality through compression algorithm improvements.
They have also announced the launch of the Xbox One in 26 new markets in September. Below is the full list of countries that will finally be able to get their hands on Microsoft's latest- full details on each market's launch will be coming soon.
-Argentina
-Belgium
-Chile
-Colombia
-Czech Republic
-Denmark
-Finland
-Greece
-Hungary
-India
-Israel
-Japan
-Korea
-Netherlands
-Norway
-Poland
-Portugal
-Russia
-Saudi Arabia
-Singapore
-Slovakia
-South Africa
-Sweden
-Switzerland
-Turkey
-UAE