Xbox One Smartglass app released by Microsoft

Written by Brandon Hofer on November 19, 2013

Xbox One Smartglass News: Microsoft finally releases the Smartglass App for Xbox One which offers a glimpse of what is to come when we pick up our new consoles on Friday.

Xbox One is out in a couple of days and Microsoft has just released the Xbox One Smartglass App. This app is the perfect companion app for your Xbox One, both in your living room and on the go. You can connect and control your Xbox One with this app. Stay connected with the games and gamers you like. In the living room you will be able to do the following

- Navigate your Xbox One console using your device’s keyboard and touch

- Control your media and set top box with the SmartGlass remote control

- Browse the web on your TV using your mobile device

- Enhance what you are watching or playing with SmartGlass companions

- Increase performance with faster connections and reliability

- Search, browse and pin content to play on your Xbox One console

- Track achievements, get game help, message friends and watch game clips

Once you download the app and sign into it using your Xbox Live information you begin to see of what can be possible. Now please keep in mind that the app is not fully functional right now and it won’t be until Friday. It wants to connect to my Xbox One but, obviously, it isn’t out yet but once it is released you’ll be able to do a whole lot more with this.

One of the things you can do right now though is take a look at the achievements category. By doing that you will see a couple of dynamic achievements that you will be prevalent on Xbox One. While using the app I came across two “featured challenges” with one of them being in Need for Speed Rivals and the other one being for FIFA 14. For Need for Speed Rivals you need to bank 5,000,000 SP during a promotion period to unlock this challenge. For FIFA 14 you need to play 5 online matches. These challenges are timed though with the Need for Speed Rivals challenge only having seven days left (as of the time of this writing) and the FIFA 14 challenge having nine days left. When you bring up one of the featured challenges there is also a button you can push to check your game progress. Keeping with the Need for Speed Rivals example, you can see how long you have played the game, how many achievements you have earned, your gamescore within that game, how many spike strips you have dropped and how many busted racers you have had. You can also see what challenges await you for that game as well as the achievements for that game and how to unlock them. If you are someone who doesn’t own Need for Speed Rivals but are curious then there is a “game details” button you can push as well. This will bring up a brief description of the game, whatever DLC is available, screenshots, videos, challenges and achievements. There are also other details about whether the game has co-op, the genre, release date and much more. It is basically a one stop shop for the game.

The Xbox One Smartglass App is available free of charge and should work on your existing phones and tablets. It seems like it is going to be a great way to add some more depth to the Xbox One experience and I am excited to see what kind of second screen features developers are going to utilize for their games. What do you think? Check out some of the pictures below of the app in action. Will you be using the SmartGlass App?

Xbox One Smartglass