It’s been a while since we’ve seen the Xbox 360 dashboard get a facelift- in fact it has been several years. The latest facelift Microsoft gave to the Xbox was years ago that gave us the capabilities of using Avatars and an online party system. With this most recent one being updated the first thing in the morning on December 7th, we can expect to see even more goodies from Microsoft this time around.

I spent some time with the new dashboard and finding out just what Microsoft has brought us gamers this time around.  One of the first and most noticeable changes in the dash is a very groovy Bing search bar. This is no doubt a clever method used by Microsoft to give their search engine, Bing, more widespread use. Although this search function for the Xbox 360 dashboard is really nothing new, there are some things that are pretty cool.

Xbox 360 in the Cloud

One of these is a cloud service offered free to all Gold members, which allows them to save their games on an online “cloud”. Now you don’t have to bring your hard drive with you when playing at a friend’s house, it can all be downloaded from the cloud. The new apps for the dashboard aren’t operational at the moment (as Microsoft told us), and throughout the month of December we will gradually see more and more of them become available for use.

If you’ve used, or even seen the Windows 8 OS, then it will become immediately clear that they drew inspiration from it to design the Xbox 360 dash. While some people may complain for a lack of originality, most will agree that it does look good, and it is a much needed facelift to the dash.

However, the benefits of it are only just starting, and the true test of whether or not it is better will come in the following weeks when we can try out the new services like Fios and Vevo.