5 Minute Take of the New Xbox Experience

I woke up a little early to get a quick view of the new xbox dashboard. I felt like I was a kid waking up Christmas morning. I booted up the 360 and it had the old update box popup. It download a 30 second update and restarted. I then had a new update screen that was doing the main update. This only took a 1 minute or so. I was surprised by that. Maybe its my 10MB connection.

The first thing it had me do was pick an avatar. Once I picked one, I got to edit him like I wanted. Mine is pretty cool. He is sporting a sweet mustache, a faux hawk, and a white suit. I wanted white shoes but unfortunately it only offered two shoe. This is a cooler feature than I expected but I hope they incorporate cloths and accessories from other games. I am specifically thinking about your closet from Rock Band.

I did some more exploring but I kept getting “can not connect to xbox.com.” I assume this is because the tens of thousands people are doing the same thing. I next tried to activate my Neflix device. I went to the Netflix page and it said the add a new device feature was temporarily disabled … try back in two hours. I guess they got a little overloaded.

I do like the blades features. I do have some questions though:

1. Why can you not preview the Rock Band downloadable tracks before you buy one?
2. All of my friends had some random object in the background of their blade. Can you change these? My brother had guitars and a drum set. He does not have Rock Band or Guitar Hero so I thought that was weird.
3. Will the streaming music and video feature work correctly on this version? I had to use Tiversity because I could never get it to work.

I have class the next two nights so I expect to give a full review over the weekend.

UPDATE #1 – Read this on Engadget. I think Sony is taking a sad route. I would have thought that Netflix would have protected this from happening but maybe not.