Hey, everyone.
I'm Jeff Bakalar for CNET.com.
Today I'm taking a 1st look at the brand new My Xbox Live app for iOS.
The app is available for iPhone, iPad, and the iPod Touch and I'm gonna be checking out the iPad version.
So after you open up the app for the 1st time and log in you're presented with a screen, gives you 3 options.
Basically, those are the 3 main pillars of the app.
So when you pop into the spotlight gallery, you're presented with about 12 videos that are normally featured on your Xbox 360 dashboard.
You can choose between videos like the Connect Show and a bunch of featured videos from game developers and publishers.
So let's say I wanna check out the Connect Show I just tap on that, the video loads right up and it starts playing the featured show on Xbox Live.
Pretty cool stuff.
So this section of the app really gets you in touch with your other friends.
From here you can also utilize the Beacon option which we talked about a few days ago a new feature that was introduced on the brand new Xbox Live dashboard update.
The My Xbox Live app is a great compliment to that new update, although it doesn't feature all of the new services that are included on that dashboard update.
However, Beacons which is a brand new feature is featured in this iOS app and we really dig it.
It gives us the opportunity to send out a massive universal call to action a call to play to all of your friends and you can also send that out on other social platform.
The final tab is the games tab and this is really a great way to analyze your game progress and a good way to look back at all the games you've played.
So here it gives us the most recent 6 games that I've played, then I can browse and literally look through the entire category, the entire library of games that I've played going all the way back to the 1st game that I've ever played on my Xbox 360, so let's see what that was.
It looks like it was Madden NHL 06.
I can also go into each game and check out the achievements that I was able to capture.
Here going back to NHL 2K6, I got 80% of those achievements.
I can then further click further and view those individual achievements as well.
And finally there's the message center, which you can access from the top right corner of the app screen.
Now to give you access to the most recent messages as well as give you the ability to compose a brand new one.
Overall, the app performs very smoothly, it's really nice to look at, very easy on the eyes.
And Microsoft obviously implementing the metro theme that is being used on all the company's platforms across all sorts of devices.
So keeping everything in sync, very easy to use, very easy to navigate.
I do wish a few things existed here like maybe the ability to start a demo download on your console.
Maybe redeem some tokens or some codes on the Xbox market place, but overall for a 1st effort, this My Xbox Live app works really well and is a great way to keep in touch with your Xbox Live experience on an iOS device.
I'm Jeff Bakalar for CNET.com and this has been a 1st look at the My Xbox Live app for iOS.
