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The movies bit is also in metro.

The controller looks a bit like the one on Nokia Big Screen with a touch DPad and control buttons.

To see the app in action, you must have an Xbox and it must be on. Connection is very easy. It will instruct you on screen to navigate to your Xbox Settings, and just set Xbox Companion to available.Your Lumia 800 will then connect to it and your Xbox will confirm any time it connects to the Lumia 800 and companion app.The app itself is split into Home (for quick play games) featured (for music/video/games) and bing searches.

When you click a game or video or search on the phone it will appear on the Xbox. I really like this as it makes exiting between games much quicker and can fully take over the only use I had for the actual Xbox Controller.

If you have a Kinect, this will marry up as a brilliant companion for the portions of Xbox that still require you to use a physical controller, such as getting Xbox companion set up.

You can navigate all of the dashboard with the companion app though some bits you might prefer to use Kinect to do the hand swiping

You’ll note that the xbox live companion automatically can turn into a 4 way controller with a select button in the middle as well as the other navigation buttons (Y, X, B) at the bottom.

Just press back to go back (:p) and you can also press the home button to go to the home page.

I didn’t get to demo on video but player controls also appear if you are playing back music/videos. You can see it in the video below.

Performance: 9

As usual, quick start up, fast and fluid yadda yadda.

The important thing here is that connection and control of Xbox dashboard navigation is quick. There is really no perecivable lag when you’re pressing a button and xbox acting like you’ve pressed a controller.

It just works. It doesn’t multitask which I don’t mind as I don’t really want it to be connected to Xbox unless I’m using the app. Connection is immediate anyway.

You will however, need to be connected to Xbox Live. If your Xbox isn’t connected to Xbox Live, the app won’t work.

Price: 10

Free

Conclusion:

Nice job integrating the phone to Xbox. It would be cool to one day stream content from the phone to the Xbox.

Still, a must have application for Xbox owners with Nokia Lumias.

It’s really useful for me as I hardly ever use the controller anyway as all my current games are Kinect only, and the only times I need the controller is for settings when Kinect cannot be used. I think for other Xbox users, it’s nice to have anyway and it’s something that impresses friends when they see it.

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