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>> Dan: I'm Dan Ackerman, we're here at the CNET AV Room and we're taking a look at the brand new Microsoft Xbox 360 Dashboard Microsoft
calls it the new Xbox experience. It's actually a mandatory upgrade when you log into your Xbox 360 sometime this week you're going to
be asked to download and install; this new Dashboard is actually quite different from the previous one you used to have these kind of
blades that would fly left and right, ya know, one for videos, one for games, one for Xbox Live. The new one has a series of rows
with different options and different promo items on it with a whole bunch of new features in the new Xbox Live some of which we like
some of which we're not as crazy about. The most important and most prominent one is probably the new Avatar system, it's very similar
to the Nintendo Wii's Mii's, those are little guys with big heads and sort of oversized features. So here's your Xbox 360 Avatar and
I can hop into the menu and edit what my Avatar looks like and from here I can change the features I can change the clothes, you can
do stuff like add new hairstyles, change the eyes, the chin, the mouth, and there aren't that many choices right now, hopefully,
Microsoft will add more like, ya know, hairstyles and clothes and things like that. Now, of course, here's my Avatar that I made the
other day, look at that, pretty good likeness if I do say so myself. The other big new feature that's really important in the new
Xbox 360 Dashboard is this integrated Netflix player, what it does is it hooks up to Netflix's On-Demand Video Library, so if you're
a Netflix subscriber instead of watching these movies and TV shows through your computer you can now stream them directly to the
Xbox 360. Now, one of the things we didn't like so much about the new Xbox experience is that of the 8 different rows of content you
can access on the Dashboard most of them seem designed to just kind of push advertising and marketing messages towards you. So even
though there's a little too much marketing information shoved into the new Xbox experience it's easy to navigate, it's easy to use,
we like the new clean design and you can access your personal info anytime by pressing the Xbox button in the middle of the controller
and from right there you can access your friends list, you can take a look at your games library, you can jump into the Marketplace,
check out your video library or even access the system settings wherever you are in the menus just by hitting that middle button. I'm
Dan Ackerman and that is the new Xbox 360 Dashboard.
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