Video: Experience the new Xbox 360 dashboard

Today, Microsoft is rolling out its most ambitious Xbox 360 system update yet -- an entirely new dashboard that bears little resemblance to the series of panels users currently use to navigate the gaming console.

Dubbed 'The New Xbox Experience', this ground-up overhaul of the system's front-end interface also introduces several new features -- most notably an avatar system to represent users online.

We've gone into great detail before about all the design and functionality changes, so having lived with the new dashboard update for the past week, we'll instead present some initial impressions -- the good, the bad and the ugly.

The new dashboard divides content, settings and functions into eight categories, each represented by a horizontal row of boxes. The new look is clean, easy to navigate, and aesthetically pleasing, although it all seems designed to push the maximum in Xbox marketing materials and advertising come-ons to the user.

Three of the rows are fully dedicated to ads and notifications from Xbox Live, while two others are mostly ads. Only the Welcome row, with basic instructional information you probably won't have to refer to more than once, and the Friends and My Xbox rows, are exempt. The Video Marketplace row, for example, combines local content on your Xbox with links to (both paid and free) video selections from the Xbox Live Marketplace and, in the US only, Netflix.

If the new dashboard has one killer app, it's the Netflix viewer. It can access and play back content from Netflix's on-demand library. Sadly, there's no plans to bring this to the UK.

Controlling the videos with the gamepad is a little trickier, and it takes some time to get used to how the buttons and triggers operate -- we were constantly accidentally backing out to the main menu by hitting the B button. Using the Harmony Xbox 360 universal remote was much easier, as the play, pause, fast-forward and rewind buttons on the remote matched up with the Netflix player. 

The avatar system is stylistically close to (but more detailed than) the Nintendo Wii's Mii characters, with large heads and exaggerated features. The opening screen shows a bunch of random characters, and asks you to choose one as a template. From there, eyes, noses, hair, and accessories can be changed around. Some categories, such as clothing, seemed rather thin, but we suspect new outfits and body parts will be added eventually.

Also notable in the new Xbox dashboard is the ability to put entire games on to the hard drive for faster loading (although you're still required to put the original disc in the drive). We tried it on Fallout 3 and didn't notice much of a difference, but other games may yield better results. The real improvement here is that the disc doesn't spin up, so the console is much quieter.

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Source: Hands on with the new Xbox 360 dashboard on CNET.com

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