Compared to the PS3's snappy X-meets-Y Emmy award-winning "XrossMediaBar" interface, the 360's stylish whooshing tabs comprised of five horizontally swappable blades can seem sluggish and flabby. Wish Microsoft would just ditch the whole thing and start over?
Wish no more, because it's happening on November 19th courtesy of Microsoft's "New Xbox Experience" or NXE. At this year's Tokyo Game Show, which by the way just kicked off, Microsoft VP John Schappert made a lot of folks smile by announcing the NXE was finished and that it'll roll out in 26 countries and 19 language in about five weeks.
What's this NXE stuff all about? Just look at the pictures, then think Extreme Home Makeover, Xbox 360 Edition (or kinda like going from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95). The biggest change? It's completely reinvented the way you navigate your Xbox 360, borrowing from Vista's Aero task switcher, allowing you to "rolodex" through its various channels, presumably paving the way for these to expand well beyond the current dashboard's five.
Here's what we know about NXE's features so far.
- It's free, and it'll work on any version of the 360. No surprise there, but it will zap its cache on restarts if you don't have a hard drive.
- Netflix support. Stream over 10,000 movies and TV shows from Netflix direct to your 360. Want to watch with friends? You can, by streaming the movie with up to seven other consoles in a "party" you can also haul around the dashboard, in and out of movies or games. Did I say party? Xbox 360 posse sounds cooler.
- Avatars. Nintendo's Miis -- cartoony caricatures you can customize to sorta-kinda look like you on the Wii -- are cute as a button, but hardly original (how quickly all you whipper-snappers forget 1990s internet forums, IM tools, The Sims, and MMOs over the years). The NXE doesn't look to be breaking any ground here, either, just staking out the usual "face-hair-body-clothes" turf. Enthusiasts will ignorantly cry "Rip off!" while casual players will probably just make open-mouthed "awww" sounds.
- Copy games straight to the hard drive. Coolest Feature Ever, because it'll finally let you play games without having to wear over-the-ear headphones to block out the growly buzz of the 360's atrociously sound-dampened DVD drive.
- Official 16:10 plus 1440x900 and 1680x1050 widescreen VGA and HDMI support. Don't know what that means? Don't worry about it. But if you do, you know it also means those annoying black formatting bars or blurry interpolation issues will finally be history.
- Xbox Live Primetime. Think "party game channel" for Xbox Live members. First up, an adaptation of the game show 1 vs. 100, where one person competes against 100 others for prizes. Additional programs will follow.
- All your existing content will come over. I'm hearing your existing themes too, which will integrate with the new interface seamlessly.
- Ad presence has been reduced, or perhaps I should say reformatted to keep better out of your way without slipping off the radar entirely.
"Why NXE?" Easy: The 360's sagging dashboard badly needed the facelift, and this ostensibly makes your info a whole lot easier to organize and locate while simultaneously enabling Microsoft to perform more frequent micro-updates to fix glitches, tweak features, and add new ones. A big win-win for everyone, in other words, and a blessing from a marketing standpoint since it dovetails with the holiday season and adds momentum to Microsoft's push to put some distance between the 360 and PS3.
Also: You'll be able to download the update when it's released, or optionally load it off any game released after or around the time the update hits on November 19th.
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Source: http://blogs.pcworld.com/gameon/archives/007902.html
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