If we’re being honest, we’ve never really been troubled by the occasional sluggishness you get when navigating between Xbox 360 Dashboard menus. Nevertheless the next update will speed things up significantly, we’re told...

Major Nelson – Larry to his Ma – is the man with the message, telling listeners of his blogcast: “We’re making the guide faster. The team has done some really good stuff around making performance enhancements. Whatever we call it, it's better with a lot of very cool new features."

Alas, the Major doesn’t find the time within his lengthy and rather self-indulgent chin-wag to detail any of these cool features, although he does reveal that the update will arrive later this year. As such we’re probably not talking about anything Project Natal-related – that tech is definitely not shipping this side of Xmas. So, does anyone else care to take a guess what he could be talking about?

Whatever the case speed – and lots of it – absolutely has to be core to the Xbox 360’s future functionality. Not just for flipping between Dashboard pages, but for forthcoming goodies like the heavy traffic-generating social networking functions, the Zune video service and live-streaming movies etc. None will be worth having at all if they’re not quick n’ easy. Anyway, more on all this soon.