New Xbox Experience is LIVE; Sony, take notes
Christmas came early today for all Xbox 360 owners. Microsoft has launched the new "user interface" (to put it lightly) for the Xbox 360, named the New Xbox Experience. I eagerly anticipated downloading the update this morning, but I set the bar low, fully expecting latency issues and other unknown problems.
Well, Microsoft didn't disappoint. The installation couldn't have been easier (fully downloaded AND installed in 2 minutes) and I've already begun poking around the new features. As you can see below, I've created my new avatar (looks a lot better than my Mii) and I spent some time this morning with the most anticipated feature, the Netflix integration. Once again, no disappointments. My queue was updated as soon as I activated my Xbox on Netflix.com and I decided to give "Ratatouille" a shot. The video ran smoothly (for a streaming video) and I was able to use my Xbox remote to fastforward and rewind. All in all, a very enjoyable experience and I've already started to add "Play it now" movies to my Netflix queue.
If anyone from Sony happens to stumble across this blog, please take notes. While I thoroughly enjoy the content you have in the Playstation Store, downloading new files can be painfully slow. I recently purchased an update to the PSN game, PAIN, and the file size was a meager 211MB. My 802.11g network *should* be able to chew through that in 5 minutes (or less), especially at 10:00 in the evening.
No such luck.The download took nearly 30-40 minutes and this seems to be typical for the Playstation Network. Granted, PSN is free-of-charge, but when you see such a drastic difference in performance between Xbox Live and PSN, I'm willing to bet that the Sony-faithful would gladly spend $50 per year for a better "experience".
