Loaded up the NXE (New Xbox Experience) this morning, and was very pleasantly surprised. What has long been a very tired interface is now fresh, fun-to-use, and nice to look at! It’s also quite snappy, which is nice.
One of the oft-discussed features of the NXE, of course, is the addition of “avatars” – an online character that represents you. The character to my left there (<—-) is the avatar that I’ve created! It’s certainly not a spitting image of me, but I would *totally* wear that outfit, and I really wish that my hair looked that cool.
My overall impression of the NXE is certainly positive, but I need to have some more hands-on time with it. Ultimately, we spend *most* of our Xbox time simply playing games, which doesn’t involve the interface or dashboard a whole lot. Now that the interface is more “community-based”, however, that might change. I can see myself checking out the parties, chatting with friends, playing UNO, and other such nonsense – at least for awhile. Should be fun!
Now for some other avatars…
Chumplet Barkjon Pastor EJO
(my brother) (my son) (my good buddy)
See you out there! 🙂
UPDATE: I’m impressed that Microsoft is continually able to “improve” their offerings via software updates. I know that’s only sensible for a software company to do that, but let’s be honest: most companies improve by throwing new, improved hardware out there, and then they get around to the software.
The Xbox 360 will be 3 years old as of Nov. 22nd, 2008. In technology years, that is a lifetime. Still, with this dashboard refresh, Microsoft has made the 360 feel new again – fresh and fun. I appreciate that the hardware isn’t the focus necessarily. The is also true for the Zune, which received another refresh recently, and that refresh could be installed even on the ver1 devices.
Pretty amazing.
Y.I.P.C.A.N.J.O 
Nice! I downloaded that dashboard today as well, and I think my photo looks pretty dang accurate.. which is sad considering my all-too-soon receding hair-line! 😛
So have you signed up with their Netflix streaming thing yet?
Hey, man. Where’s your avatar link? What is your gamertag???
Anyhow, we’ve been using Netflix for quite awhile now, though we have the *lowest of lows* plan at $4.99/month. Sadly, that plan is NOT allowed on the Xbox/Netflix dealy-yo 😦 Not a huge deal, though. We’ll just need to upgrade to the $8.99/month plan!
It works well as long as you don’t want to watch any movies published by Sony. I tried it last night and it seemed to work well, it stopped and had to rebuffer/lower resolution twice, but I imagine that was more my connection than anything else. It’s a pretty sweet feature.
[IMG]http://i39.photobucket.com/albums/e154/drthemoworm/avatar-body.png[/IMG]
Or if for some reason that didn’t work, http://avatar.xboxlive.com/avatar/drthemoworm/avatar-body.png
My tag is DrThemoWorm
Also, I subscribed to the Netflix streaming deal they have for $8.99, and my only problem is that you also can only pick movies that they have available for instant streaming, which is quite a bit fewer than their physical DVD selection. Ah well, I guess they’ll fix that soon enough.