With Windows 10 comes quite a bit of news in the universe of Microsoft. While much of the focus will be on Windows 10 for PC’s, phones, and tablets, Microsoft is showing great attention to detail with this year’s major OS release. By year’s end Microsoft will release a greatly updated Xbox One app which will allow gamers to be more heavily integrated with their console from their other devices.
In the meantime there is a preview app that comes with the January Technical preview. The preview release of the app included a few features that Microsoft refers to as ‘basic’ such as supporting keyboard and mouse inputs, and high resolution monitors but the greatest changes are in the social sphere of gaming. The app includes four major categories; your profile, home, messages, and settings. Major Nelson goes over the basics in a YouTube video, you can watch it here:
The app has a long list of features that create a more connected social experience across all of your devices. It can notify you when your favorite friends are online, when you receive a message, and when one of your friends begins broadcasting on twitch. It can help you find more people to follow under the ‘People you might know’ and ‘VIP’s of Xbox’ sections and lets you see and comment on the activity feed of your friends achievements and clips.
Your profile focuses on you last game played, recent achievements, game clips, and games that you are following. Messages doesn’t add anything complicated but it does give you the ability to view messages from within the app. The live tile can display activity alerts, the number of your friends that are online and unread messages.
There will be other features that will come along with the app later this year aren’t revealed yet but even with the current preview version of the app Microsoft is making a strong push to connect your Xbox with your other Microsoft devices.
