Microsoft has a little treat for all you Xbox 360 owners this Halloween (let’s hope it doesn’t become a trick!) in the form of a Xbox 360 Dashboard Update. That’s right – the latest update is known as the November ’06 upgrade despite the fact that it’ll roll out tomorrow (Halloween for those of you who don’t realize it’s that day!).

Here are the details of the update:

• Xbox Live Arcade gets a whole new look under the Dashboard including some new features. There’s a new logo and the buttons get a facelift also. Here are changes under Xbox Live Arcade:

• Fast enumeration of games – The current dashboard takes FOREVER to list all the games you might have downloaded. The new one should be super fast
• Auto downloads of new game trials. You can set the 360 to automatically download any new trial version of an Xbox Live Arcade game
• There’s a new sort feature – you can sort video games by recently played and by category
• There’s new achievements and leadership boards. You can get full details for achievements and view top ten friends leaderboards for each game. You can also “tell a friend” about a game
• Play Now actually.. Plays Now! The Play Now button after you download a game actually starts up the game as opposed to bringing you to the Xbox Live Arcade menu

• With the Xbox 360 HD DVD drive coming out VERY soon, a big part of the update was focused on making sure the console supports the new HD DVD player.
• Xbox Live notifications disabled while watching movies (they’re annoying when they pop up!)
• Improved countdown timer
• Zoom controls for letterboxed content
• Support for 50Hz HDTV modes
• Video playback now shares playback controls with the DVD player – so you can get things like skip and zoom
• Screen saver is now working when videos are paused
• Visual and performance improvements

• Well well well. the 360 is getting streaming video support finally. You can stream video from a PC, portable device or from a memory card unit – it’s about time! The video area looks similar to the music and pictures section. Up until this update, you could stream music and photos but you could not stream videos. You needed a Windows Media Center PC to stream any video content to the 360. No more with this update

• There’s added support for Windows Media Player 11 now within the 360 which takes over control of Windows Media Connect (which used to be separately added to WMP 10). With WMP11, you control all connections from within the player itself
• The 360 will support the Zune as a device to stream from

• As expected, 1080p has been added to the Xbox 360
• You can now play video files from data CDs and DVDs!

• Support for some stuff coming down the road

• Support for three new accessories coming up:

• HD DVD
• Xbox 360 Wireless Headset
• Wireless Racing Wheel

• New locales
• Improved translations for several languages
• Improved multiplayer host migration
• Improved Xbox Live Vision support
• Improved voice chat quality
• Expanded Family Settings for unrated movies

This isn’t the complete list of course – there’s a lot more here in the November update and you can find the complete list here at Xbox.com.

[Check out the complete list]

[Check it out via 1UP.com]

Technorati Tags: Xbox 360, Xbox 360 Dashboard Update, November 2006 Update, Microsoft, Microsoft Xbox