Larry “Major Nelson” Hyrb, Xbox LIVE’s director of programming, has announced that the spring update for Xbox 360 operating system software is beginning to roll out. A “few” players will receive the update this week and everyone else will have it by next week. The announcement came via a tweet on Hyrb’s Twitter account.
The inevitable Twitter flood of curiosity about what features the update will contain was enough to elicit a second response from Hyrb. Though vague, it does hint that the Xbox team at Microsoft is already setting the stage for the features it announced last week during the Microsoft E3 press conference. Check out the tweets below:
If you got an Xbox 360 System Update: Spring update rolling out to a few this week –everyone else next week.
The system updated contains behind the scenes improvements & prep for future enhancements
Those “future enhancements” Hyrb mentions so casually are big features, including the Internet Explorer browser for Xbox 360, an expansion for Bing voice search using Kinect, and Microsoft SmartGlass integration, which Microsoft promises will turn the Xbox 360 into the entertainment hub around which all of our devices revolve and interact. Also, Microsoft has announced that it is killing the Zune brand, meaning that the Zune Marketplace on Xbox will soon get a revamp, and the new Xbox Music will partly take its place.
That’s all the news that is currently announced for the spring software update, but Hyrb did tweet out a link today for a brand-new Microsoft product: for 240 Microsoft Points, your Xbox avatar can, as seen in the picture above, become a former Skyrim adventurer.
(Picture via xbox.com)