Xbox Live gets goosed

Some of the other tweaks are more about personal preference. If you leave your 360 on and walk away, your Friends List status will mark you as Away, so your pals won't bomb you with invites and think you're ignoring them. While the Xbox Live Vision digital camera won't be ready until September, the system's ready now; when it's released, you'll be able to add your personal photo, which only friends can see (everybody else gets your standard gamer picture). And for true nerds, you can now boot the system to the Xbox Dashboard instead of immediately loading the disc in the drive. That's handy for checking your messages and setting up invites.

The download will be available next week, and while it packs a lot of changes, the download file itself is quite small; it'll probably take less than a minute to snag and install. If you're not wired for broadband, you'll get the update this summer via game discs and quite possibly through the demo disc that comes with our sister publication, Official Xbox Magazine. Microsoft plans another update in the fall, just in time for the big holiday game releases.