Avatars, photo sharing and hopefully fewer service outages await 360 owners with "New Xbox Experience", which carries with it the ugly acronym of "NXE".
Microsoft's periodically updated the Xbox Live service (usually with a concurrent service outage), and today's update promises (at least on digital paper) to be a little more than just bug fixes.
Microsoft refers to it as the "New Xbox Experience", which carries with it the ugly acronym of "NXE". NXE uses an avatar-based approach to the 360's Live offerings -- think a cross between the Wii's Miis and the promises that Sony's been pitching for the still-unfathomably-in-beta PS3 "Home" service, as well as voice, text chat and some multimedia sharing via Xbox Live "Party". Clearly, avatars are where it's at.
We fired up an office Xbox 360 to check out the changes, but, at the time of writing, the only indication of the "NXE" was a brief message from Xbox indicating that our system would automatically begin downloading it on November 19th, with nothing sitting in our download queue to indicate it had begun.
Checking with Microsoft, it appears that we're once again in the grip of the evil international dateline, with the official response being that we have to wait until clock ticks over in the US to November 19th, around 9pm tonight. Microsoft indicated that the NXE update should be under 200MB, which could be a touch painful for those on limited bandwidth plans.
Microsoft's been nothing if not aggressive on the console front recently, with solid price drops across its console ranges recently, and the claim that it will have shortly sold 25 million consoles within a three year period -- more, according to Microsoft than original Xbox consoles sold.
Our inner cynic can't help but wonder how many of those 25 million went down with the infamous red rings of doom, however.
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