Xbox Companion App coming Tuesday, December 6th

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Hot on the heels of the Xbox 360 Dashboard update comes the Xbox Companion App for Windows Phone. The Companion App for Windows Phone is one of the first apps that will truly augment your Xbox 360 user experience, giving you a parallel method to effortless retrieve current information about media, in addition to selecting things to watch. From the Windows Phone Blog a few months ago:

  • "Finding Content: Just like on your Xbox, the Xbox Companion gives you instant access to the Xbox LIVE Marketplace catalog of games, movies, music and TV shows. I used it to search “Featured Content” and pulled up the X-Men: First Class.
  • Learn more about what you’re watching, listening to, or playing: Once I found the movie and touched the movie tile, the Xbox companion app took me to an info page that has all the related details about. And the content is really rich, too – for example, when I swiped to the “cast” page and touched an actor’s name, like star James McAvoy, I was taken to other movies starring him. From there, I could easily learn more about the other movies, their cast, etc. It’s an infinite road of interactive content.
  • Control & Play: Once I selected the content and hit play, the Xbox Companion flips into “controller mode” in which I could navigate my Xbox, or control video playback of your video. The best part here is that controls are virtually instantaneous – easily as fast as using my controller or a TV remote."

We got to personally play with the app back in October at Nokia World and we were quite impressed with it. The main reason? It didn't feel gimmicky or something "cool but we'd never use" (like our front-facing camera on our phone), but instead it felt like an app that we would use a lot and for legitimate reasons. Combined with that Xbox 360 Dashboard update, which we've been rocking for a few weeks now, this mini-overhaul to the Xbox should be pretty killer for an already great system.

We'll keep our eyes peeled for it on Tuesday and in the meantime, you can check out our video hands on after the break.

Source: Major Nelson

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Daniel Rubino
Daniel Rubino
Editor-in-chief

Daniel Rubino is the Editor-in-chief of Windows Central. He is also the head reviewer, podcast co-host, and analyst. He has been covering Microsoft since 2007, when this site was called WMExperts (and later Windows Phone Central). His interests include Windows, laptops, next-gen computing, and watches. He has been reviewing laptops since 2015 and is particularly fond of 2-in-1 convertibles, ARM processors, new form factors, and thin-and-light PCs. Before all this tech stuff, he worked on a Ph.D. in linguistics, watched people sleep (for medical purposes!), and ran the projectors at movie theaters because it was fun.