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The “insanely awesome” but not quite available Xbox Companion app for Windows Phone

Oct 5, 2011 10:32 am by Kip Kniskern | 5 comments

Lots of news around Xbox today, including news coming from a blog post on the Windows Phone blog that along with Xbox, Kinect, Bing, and a host of new entertainment providers, Windows Phone is joining the party with a soon to be released, and completely free (well except for the Xbox, Kinect, and Xbox Live part, of course) “Xbox Companion” app for Windows Phone.

The app will let you Find, Learn, and Control your Xbox entertainment experience, according to Ben Rudolf in the blog post:

I was lucky enough to get my hands on a beta copy of the app to try out with my Xbox and I have to say that it’s really impressive. Here’s an actual scenario I ran through with the app and my Xbox the other day:
Finding Content: Just like on your Xbox, the Xbox Companion gives you instant access to the Xbox LIVE Marketplace catalog of games, movies, music and TV shows. I used it to search “Featured Content” and pulled up the X-Men: First Class.
Learn more about what you’re watching, listening to, or playing: Once I found the movie and touched the movie tile, the Xbox companion app took me to an info page that has all the related details about. And the content is really rich, too – for example, when I swiped to the “cast” page and touched an actor’s name, like star James McAvoy, I was taken to other movies starring him. From there, I could easily learn more about the other movies, their cast, etc. It’s an infinite road of interactive content.
Control & Play: Once I selected the content and hit play, the Xbox Companion flips into “controller mode” in which I could navigate my Xbox, or control video playback of your video. The best part here is that controls are virtually instantaneous – easily as fast as using my controller or a TV remote.

Rudolf promises a full video review of the app, we’ll be watching for it!

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http://twitter.com/efjay01 Ef Jay
Awesome! My WP7, Xbox and Kinect are eagerly waiting. :D
Anonymous
For the Xbox/Windows Phone teams consideration: I think “Xbox Fuse” would be a better name for the app (you would be “fusing” the Xbox phone experience with the Xbox console experience).
Also “Fuse” is more marketable than “Xbox Companion
Brandon
pretty cool but I was hoping to read about them actually delivering the phone-interact-with-gaming capability they showcased in the early Windows Phone online commercials. When are we going to be getting that??
- Anonymous
  I think the dashboard integration will be the first of these types of experiences. Then there will be add on functionality like changing the music playlist you have playing behind your game using your phone instead of having to pull up the guide. Then there will be experiences (depending on Dev support) that supplement gameplay in some way
  It would be really impressive if the “Xbox Companion” (or as it should be called “Xbox Fuse”) would be aware of what you were watching or listening to on your xbox and you could simply hit a little “i” or “info” command on the apps command bar and it would pull up info on that content without having to search for it on the phone
http://twitter.com/louissenkowsky Louis Senkowsky
Will I be able to fast forward my music?