Microsoft today made some major announcements at their E3 presentation. First was the brand new Xbox 360 dashboard. This new interface (which you can see above thanks to pics from Engadget) will feature characters that remind me strongly of the Nintendo Wii “Mii” avatars, and a sliding interface very similar to iTunes coverflow.
The new dashboard experience also takes element of the upcoming Playstation Home feature, and Facebook, and marries it all together in an interesting mash-up of sorts. It looks very interesting, and will give your Xbox 360 a facelift, which will hopefully make the system feel new all over again.
On top of that, Microsoft showed some great trailers including Gears of War 2 and revealed that the next Final Fantasy game WILL be making its way to the 360!
Finally, the keynote ended with “one more thing…” the announcement that Netflix and Microsoft were patterning to bring the Netflix “watch now” feature to an Xbox near you. This won’t give you access to new releases, but there are 10,000 + titles that you can watch on your Xbox 360 for free anytime you want, as part of your Netflix subscription (providing you are an Xbox Live Gold member as well).
All in all, a very impressive keynote from Microsoft that shows us that the Xbox360 clearly is full of life and ready to provide new experiences throughout 2008 and 2009. Here’s hoping this console is around for many more years to come. With updates like these there’s no reason for it not to be.