Microsoft has announced a host of new Xbox apps, including SkyDrive, but it’s a poor showing for Australian users.
Over on Major Nelson’s blog, there’s a list of 52 apps that are coming to your Xbox Live dashboard. The Major lists 10 apps available from today, and another 42 on their way from now until “spring 2013”, or “autumn next year” as we know it in Australia.
However, of those 52, only four are definitely listed as being available locally, with another three on the “possible” list. The roll out for these is described as the “majority of Live regions”.
The four confirmed for Australia are:
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Karaoke
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SkyDrive
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GameTrailers
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IndieFlix
The three possible ones include CrunchyRoll, Deezer and Machinima.
To be clear, this isn’t suggesting that Australia is the only country missing out on all the other appsand the rest of the world getting all 52 — it’s very much a targeted country-by-country release. But to put it in perspective, Germany has 13 new apps confirmed, plus the three maybes.
As we noted above, one of the apps that is definitely coming to Australia is SkyDrive, with Dan Somrack, program developer for the cloud service confirming that the app will be available for Xbox from today.
The app will sync the drive in the same way that it does on a phone or PC, with the most immediate use being that the Xbox could be used to play a slideshow of pictures or videos stored on the service. The app will even support Kinect gesture and voice controls.