Today marks the launch of Windows 8, which is being described, with only forgivable amounts of melodrama, as a make-or-break for Microsoft, not least in terms of their Star Trekish recent tendency to release crowd-pleasing and infuriating operating systems alternately.
Also today, however, Microsoft released their first SmartGlass-compatible applications, in the shape of workable applications for the Xbox 360 and the new Xbox-branded section of Windows 8.
Smart What Again?
SmartGlass was launched at this year's E3, and is, contrary to expectations, not actually a type of glass at all, except in the very specific way that it runs on silicon (think it through). It is an application which allows devices running Microsoft operating systems to interact. In practical terms, this means that your main screen will be supported by a "second screen", whether that is a phone, laptop or tablet. At E3, this lined up alongside and against Sony's Cross-Play feature and the touchscreen on Nintendo's Wii U GamePad, but the fact that it is software-based and hardware-agnostic (within reason) makes it actually a considerably different proposition.
I saw SmartGlass' integration with Xbox being put through its paces before release, and had a chance to see the strengths and limitations of the platform.
Screens and boxes
The first part of the SmartGlass proposition is the Xbox - as television screens, being large and distant, are the most immediate target for second-screen applications. The first application uses the second screen effectively as a smart remote - turning it into an input device. This is, in particular, aimed at the new Internet Explorer browser - browsing on the TV has always been a dicey proposition due to the the limitations of the entry mechanism. Unless you were one of those hypersocial types with a chatpad, entering search terms with a controller or Kinect voice recognition was always going to be a tough sell. The new, HTML5-compliant browser is designed for large-screen browsing, with big fonts, no toolbar and minimal buttonage - although the presence of history deletion and malware protection is a good source of knowing chuckles, suggesting as it does a specific lean-back experience. As an aside, the Facebook and Twitter apps which previously lay unused on the Xbox 360 dashboard have now been folded into the web browser, which seems a sensible piece of decluttering.
The platform-agnosticism of SmartGlass means that it will offer this functionality not only across Windows 8 devices and Windows Phone 8 phones, but also Android and iOS, through free apps which will be delivered after a window of Windows exclusivity. If I were a Microsoft product marketeer, I would be thinking of killer bonus apps to fold into the Surface tablet, but the generic quality of the input might make this harder to justify: already teasy hardware partners might become actively seditious if their Windows 8 tablets were made less capable at the application layer. Of course, the need to replicate functionality across these various devices, and their various input methods, limits what one can do with SmartGlass. This is not likely to lead to the kind of very tight integration of game and second screen promised, for example, by the Wii U, but that is not the intention. SmartGlass is better seen as something between an input device and a support device. One gaming example provided was Forza Horizon, where a SmartGlass-enabled tablet could provide an informative (but largely non-interactive) GPS display as the car raced on the TV screen.
The Xbox tiles in Windows 8 serve to unite media and gaming content under the Xbox brand - on a functional level, this means that apps, games and media can be ordered and downloaded from the new Windows stores on any device and cloud-shared through the user's Microsoft-sanctioned identity (such as a Hotmail account). This also showcases Microsoft's rejigged media options.
Gone is the Zune brand, replaced by Xbox Music, which as a service should be immediately recognizable to anyone who has used a music service in the past five years. Recommendations are provided based on music choice from the service's 30 million tracks, and can be streamed either free (with advertising) or for a monthly fee (without advertising). Like Xbox Live Gold membership, with which is must at some point be bundled, Xbox Music subscriptions will be available in 1, 3 and 12-month blocks. "Smart DJ" once again uses up one of the available permutations of a signifier of intelligence and a curator of music, and autogenerates playlists based on the music the owner has previously listened to.
This can all happen on the device, but things get a little interesting when the main music player is shifted to a nearby Xbox 360. At that point, the device can be used to skip and select, but also throws up autobiographical information, discographies and further recommended listening on the device screen. The idea of the SmartGlass second screen as, in effect, a directed browsing enhancement.
The same mechanism exists for films purchased from the Xbox film store - all contain enhanced data which provides information on, for example, all the actors on stage at a particular time. This was demonstrated with The Bourne Noun, and it was actively fun to see characters winking in and out of the device screen's view as they entered and left the scene. If you want to know who that achingly familiar distinguished-looking older gentleman is, this is a nice shortcut - although probably in the realm of the nice-to-have rather than the must-have.
It's David Strathairn, incidentally. Almost always.
Of more interest is the ability to switch video playback from the TV screen to a device, where it syncs through the cloud. So, one could "flick" a movie from playing on the physical Xbox 360 to the virtual Xbox app on your tablet and pick up where you left off while traveling. This kind of "flick to tablet" has been seen before in services like ComCast's XFinity, which did it using an iPad app, but licensing problems make it hard to make this "trip to the mall" portable rather than "trip to the kitchen" portable. SmartGlass licenses one instance of the title across its connected devices, so that a film can be watched on the Xbox-connected big screen or the smaller-screen device, but not both at once.
Verdict
SmartGlass is not being presented as revolutionary, which is sensible. However, taken as a whole - along with the revisions to the Xbox dashboard - it does start to make a case for upgrading to Windows 8, which is exactly what Microsoft needs it to do. The ability to fold other and existing devices into its functionality should probably come onstream sooner rather than later, as a matter of marketing logic. Many, many more Xbox owners already have iPhones, iPads or Android devices than currently have Windows 8 installed on their PCs, and this balance will continue for some time. If the virtues of SmartGlass appeal on your non-Windows tablet or phone, the logic of bringing your PC into the same ecosystem may be compelling.
Despite the pizzazz of its launch, Smartglass does not actually do a lot that cannot already be done - I do what Smartglass does currently with a mix of third party apps, cloud storage, DLNA gatewaying and so on, and so I imagine do many others. However, taking a leaf from Apple's book and offering an ecosystem that "just works" is not a bad idea at all. Whether it will return some momentum to Windows 8 (and, to a lesser extent, the Microsoft Surface tablet project) is an interesting question.
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