What About Xbox Smartglass?

English: Microsoft XBOX 360 Kinect Sensor. Video Kinect: Make live video chats with your Xbox LIVE users under the Standard kinect camera. Video Kinect (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Just like you, I’m just hearing about Xbox Smartglass.  Microsoft promises to change how you watch your media, play video games, and surf the web evermore with Xbox Smartglass.  From watching the YouTube video which had been uploaded by YouTube user, WMPowerUser, it appears that Xbox Smartglass allows users to push media from a mobile device, whether that be an Android or iPhone or iPad or Windows Phone, onto the living room TV which connects to an Xbox 360.  This means you can watch whatever on your mobile device halfway and then push the media onto the TV which resides in your living room so you can finish watching or playing the rest of the media.  It’s unclear that users will be able to do this for movies and songs only, because if users can also push video games, web browsing materials, and much more from one device onto another using Xbox Smartglass, it will be truly awesome as users get to be evermore immersive with their media through the devices that they’ve already owned and loved.

The genius of Xbox Smartglass is a step beyond Kinect.  It does not require users to buy specific device to make it works, because Xbox Smartglass is an application which will be released by Microsoft for many popular devices that people might have already owned.  Nonetheless, the combination of Xbox Smartglass and Kinect is truly remarkable as it allows users to be able to use not only their mobile devices as the coolest remote controls but in conjunction with Kinect they can also rely on their other human sensors such as hand gesture and voice to fully satisfy how one would go about communicating with their media devices.  Xbox 360 combines Kinect and Smartglass to allow users to be able to surf the web on their TV like never before, because mobile devices will be able to control the web surfing activity on the TV and Kinect will allow users to use voice and gesture to navigate the web even further.  Obviously though, without Xbox 360 neatly dictates the wishes and wants from the mobile devices and the TVs, there won’t be the amazing feat of expanding the media experience.  Even the Kinect itself is just an accessory to Xbox 360.

Perhaps, the next generation of Xbox video game console might make the living room media experience even better than what we have seen so far with Xbox 360.  One thing though, I dislike how I’ve to pay an annual fee for Xbox Live so I can stream Netflix videos and other similar streaming contents.  After all, I’m already a Netflix subscriber, why would I want to go pay Microsoft for something that I already have a subscription to?  In fact, I can just hook my PC or PS3 to a TV and get to watch Netflix for free!  I think Xbox Live is a big mistake, because it’s something that might make users who do not like the idea of having too many annual fee this and that on the top of other monthly fees from various media services.  When adding all the monthly and annual fees up, users will see that each year their media pleasure might be rather expensive than they would have thought!!!  I think Microsoft might be able to convince more people to adopt Xbox 360 and future Xbox console iterations in the living room by letting go the Xbox Live annual fee.

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