One of the coolest reveals as this year’s E3 was definitely Microsoft’s SmartGlass, the phone and tablet integrated Xbox 360 controller app. Not only would it allow you to control your Xbox using your phone, but could be utilised by developers to add some Wii U-like functionality to their games. Now, the app is available on Android, although much of its coolness is yet to be realised.
For now, the app allows you to control the system, including menu navigation, media control, and text entry, via whichever keyboard you have installed on your phone. There aren’t any games that use it yet, but they will hopefully come over time.
When not connected to your system, the app functions as a portal to your Xbox Live account. You can browse your recent games, check on your friends, send and receive messages, compare achievements, and adjust your avatar. There are already apps that contains many of these functions, but SmartGlass does it in a stylish way and seems to have more options than many of the other apps. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a way of triggering notifications when you receive a message, but I suppose that’s okay.
When connected to your Xbox, you have a trackpad on screen for scrolling around, along with the usual controller buttons for making selections. It works quite well, although it’s tough to imagine a time when a controller wouldn’t work better. The media playback is nice, as you also get play/pause, skip, and rewind/fast forward buttons on screen, but unfortunately, these don’t appear when playing music in the Xbox dashboard. Shame, as I often plug an iPod into my Xbox in order to play it over the stereo.
The keyboard functionality is probably the best part of the SmartGlass app, as it utilises whichever keyboard you have installed on your phone. Since the 360 Chat Pad can’t hold a candle to Android’s Swiftkey, and I can rarely be bother to plug in a full-sized USB keyboard, I foresee this becoming my primary means of entering text on my console. I haven’t tried it inside of any games yet, but it works great in the dashboard.
I really hope that developers start integrating this app into their games, as many people already own smartphones so the market is there. For now, it’s a neat little app, but not as cool as Microsoft made it out to be during E3. However, it’s another reason why our current selection of consoles, with their upgradable software and improving functionality, are so awesome.
Grab the Xbox SmartGlass app from HERE.
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