Topic: Xbox Smartglass

[W7RE]

My brother just got an iPod touch and I had him install Xbox Smartglass. The friends list view and avatar stuff are sort of cool, but the actual Smartglass implementation (where you control your xbox with our iOS device) sort of sucks. I was expecting it to mirror the dashboard on the iPod and let me use touch to navigate. Instead it gives you the face buttons in the corners of the screen, and swiping does the same thing that the left stick would do on the controller. You're still just hopping from one tile to another, but using swiped instead of the analog stick.

I would have been way slicker if you'd had a replication of your dashboard and could just touch what you want.

[Cobra951]

So the purpose of this thing is to control your Xbox remotely?  To what end?  You can already go online, look at friends, send them messages, read theirs, buy stuff and have it go on the box's download queue.  Is there something more significant to it than that?

[K-man]

Yo dawg I herd you like GUI's

[W7RE]

Basically all it does is remap some of the controller's functions to soft buttons on the device. It's like holding a slightly smaller xbox controller that only has the left analog stick and the 4 face buttons. That's it. The rest of the functionality was in the Xbox Live app for iOS before Smartglass existed.

I remember them making it sound like SmartGlass was supposed to be a lot more like the WiiU controller. Maybe it is with games that support it, but the dashboard integration seems really lacking.



Here's what UI looks like for navigating your dashboard:



Yup, it's just the controller buttons mapped to your phone.