Played with it long and hard this morning......and then I tried the new Xbox 360 dash (Hey-O!).
Had absolutely no trouble finding content and the Bing Search worked flawlessly with my Kinect. I had to update a lot of stuff, though.
- Netflix is better than ever (didn't know that Netflix parties were removed, though. Maybe because Netflix isn't as profitable as it was and it's missing a lot of content it used to have). Everything is accessible via controller, voice, or gestures which is great. The rewind/fast forwad feature is still there (somebody said it was gone). Just wave at the TV first and then you can fastforward or rewind just by moving your hand left or right. Still awesome.
It's also got a new (or new to me) feature that lets you jump to the next episode of a show as the first episode is ending. Streaming is a lot better now, too. I used to use my PS3 exclusively for Netflix because of the slow loading time and the "Your connection speed has changed" messages. Now that that's gone, I'm back to being a 360 Netflix user.
-There was a media player update, too. Pretty cool. Some videos that wouldn't play before (saved to my portable HDD) now work on the 360.
-Kinect is super responsive, now. I did the reconfiguration test for hand recognition, facial recognition, and voice recognition. Whether using my hands or my voice, the result was satisfactory. I did have to use the controller a few times, though. I was trying to do everything that the dashboard offered and some of the things still don't support Kinect (like listening to music from an HDD).
-Just realized that I didn't see my Achievements.......
Couple of things I wish they would have added:
-The ability to gift games. The Wii can do it. Why can't the 360? Some Arcade games are great but none of my friends will buy them. If I could gift them, M$ would get my money and I'd have someone to play Splosion Man with. It's win/win.
-Auto-Off feature. I want to be able to set it for two hours so I can fire up Netflix and go to sleep with a movie playing. They've added a 1-Hour option which is cool (before, it was 6-hours or inactivity) before the console shut off. Two hours is the magic number for me!
-I criticize the PS3 for it but I'd welcome an option to do one big update of everything on the 360 instead of just doing each app one by one. In the end, it would save me some time. I spent a lot of time waiting for Netlix, ESPN, Last.FM, etc to update. Should have been able to set them all and walk away. My Droid can do multiple updates at once. Why can't my 360?
That's it. My final words. Can't wait for youtube and all of its content to be at the command of my voice. I give the new interface a B+
