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It’s official. After months of buildup, hype, pomp, and circumstance, Xbox owners are finally getting their hands on the “New Xbox Experience”. At 5:00a EST, Microsoft opened the flood gates and 360 owners were greeted to a mandatory system update when they started up their consoles. So, how smooth was the launch? We’ll see over the next few days and weeks, but in the meantime, I can at least share my own “New Xbox Experience”.

Well, like many of the gaming masses, this morning was my first solo run at the NXE. Sure, a number of people managed to get in some early access, courtesy of a consumer survey from Microsoft a couple of weeks ago, but I wasn’t one ‘em. So at 5am on the nose, I booted up my 360 and, sure enough, the update was ready for me. The download process was much faster than I expected, as apparently MS had already done a lot of the heavy lifting with earlier updates. From start to finish, the whole thing only took about two minutes.

As soon as the update installed, I was greeted to a flashy (and otherwise useless) new introduction video. Then I was told to create an avatar. If you haven’t seen the avatar system in action, you’re in for a bit of a surprise. For all the talk of MS ripping on the Miis from Nintendo, the truth is, the 360’s avatar system feels a lot deeper. While you can’t reposition details on the face like you can on the Wii (sorry, no Admiral Ackbars or Chewbaccas here), you have a much wider variety of options to customize your avatar as you see fit. I managed to create a respectable recreation of myself, and tossed together a couple of fun outfits, and was finally ready to hit the town.

I spent some time maneuvering through the new dashboard, and on the whole, was pretty impressed with how easy it was to navigate. One problem I did run into, though, was with my old theme. Previously, Microsoft assured everyone that their old theme purchases would work fine when integrated into the NXE. Technically, it was right … but only partially. Apparently, the new themes only use the first image in the set by default. Other images show up in certain menus, but are usually completely blocked off by whatever menu dialogue box is on the screen. Plus, even for the images that do show up, about the bottom third of that picture is cut off by the bottom of the new dashboard. So my nifty Heroes theme is now little more than the top of Claire’s head to about her mouth.

Being a card carrying Netflix member, that was the next option I had to take for a test run. Or at least I would have, if I could have gotten my 360 to activate as a Netflix-ready device. In order to get the service running on the 360, you’ve first got to enter an activation code given to you on the 360 screen into the Netflix website. It should have been a simple process, but it wasn’t. After numerous tries, I finally gave up and called Netflix support. After a twenty minute wait, I was told that the Netflix servers were simply overwhelmed and that technicians were working on it. Early this morning, there were still issues with the server, but I was finally able to get the 360 activated and start watching some movies. I’ve got to admit that, for me, this is one of the cooler NXE features. I had occasional issues staying connected though, sporadically kicking me out of the movies I was watching due to being booted from either Xbox LIVE or from Netflix. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that’s probably more of a temporary issue, though, seeing as how everyone and their mother is probably logging onto both services at the moment. Hopefully, things will level off soon and connection issues will be resolved.

I’d like to say everything was running as smooth as silk. I’d like to, but I can’t. While for the most part, after setting everything up, my time spent with NXE was worry free, there were still a couple of times I ran into a few glitches. So far, since the update, I’ve have my 360 lock up on me twice in the dashboard. The first time, I was watching a video on Netflix when it froze up and I got completely locked out of the console. The second time, I was in the Friends menu and the system froze up for about 20 or 30 seconds before it started running again. As soon as it did, I got a notice that a friend had sent me a voice message, which makes me wonder if both of these freezes were caused by issues with the network.

I haven’t had a chance to play around with some of the other NXE nuances, like the hard drive installation of games, but overall, the New Xbox Experience seems to be delivering one most of its promise. Short of some growing pains and occasional technical snafu, things seem to working well. While some of the announced features, such as Netflix movie night parties with your buddies, are still coming, what has been released so far is more than enough to make the New Xbox Experience worth the wait.

Tags: Avatar, dashboard, Microsoft, Netflix, New Xbox Experience, NXE, Xbox 360