The New Xbox Experience

Today Microsoft had the “New Xbox Experience” go online for consumers everywhere to update and be welcomed by a completely new interface instead of the old Dashboard.

Thank god!

First of all; the old Dashboard was never any good! I haven’t ever liked it and was very pleased when they announced the new one way back.

So finally it’s here, but is it any good?

I’d say yes, it is. It’s much sleeker, easier to navigate and first and foremost so much faster! I still don’t think it’s clean enough (like Sony’s Cross Media Bar, or XMB in short) but it’s absolutely not bad looking so I’m not sad.

One of the biggest things with the new system is the implementation of Avatars. As you probably already know they’re pretty much just better looking versions of Nintendo’s Mii. I gotta admit, and this hurts to say, I like them. I really liked the Mii to. Most people like character customization and Xbox’s setup is quite good. It’s easy enough to scroll through the different options and the end result is a somewhat pleasant character. Hopefully they’ll add more items over time since there wasn’t very much to choose from right now.

 

The New Xbox Experience

But the one and biggest thing now is the option to install game data on the harddrive, reducing loading time and the noise caused by the disc continually spinning in the console. I haven’t tried out this feature yet and I’m not even sure any of games support it but I’m sure it’ll work just fine. There are some videos out here on the web showing comparisons of games being installed and not; the difference of the amount of time taken from starting the game from the Xbox-menu to actually be playing the game after the games Main Menu is amazing in games such as GTA IV, Gears of War and Fable 2.

Too bad I only got the 20Gb HDD… I’m guessing it’ll fill up quite fast with this new feature.

If you’ve tried out the new dashboard-menu-thingy yourself, please let me know what you think by commenting.

I truly welcome change and I must give Microsoft the thumbs up for this one, the New Xbox Experience! Sounds epic, doesn’t it?