So the New Xbox Experience launches on the 19^th of November, that’s almost a month away. But select members of the press already have it. They’re already sharing their opinions with us so we’ll take a look as well. See what works and what doesn’t, which features shine and which ones could use a little work.

From a technical point of view, the most outstanding feature is the new ability to save your games on the Xbox’s hard disk. Gone is the noisy spin of the drive, the games are now (to varying degrees) running faster and there is less wear-and-tear on the disks themselves. All-in-all it takes about 10 minutes to copy the game to hard disk, and you can run it. It does require the disk to be in the drive when you start the game, but only as a basic measure for copy protection. It reads it once and then switches to loading from the HDD. Gamers worried about getting their collection game disks damaged will now breathe easy. The only downside is, what if you have the 20 GB hard disk version of the Xbox 360, or the version with no HDD at all? Considering the price for an upgrade to the 120 GB HDD is $150 dollars (which some press members are calling highway robbery), you can see how that might be a problem. Nevertheless, the feature is very good.

Speaking of new HDD features, a very good one is the ability to stream Netflix movies and TV shows to watch directly on the Xbox, but the downside is that apart from the separate application download for the feature, you actually have to log on to your Netflix account on a PC to get the ball rolling. It’s annoying, especially if you don’t have a PC readily available.

Interface-wise, there’s plenty of eye-candy. The GUI has been completely redesigned and now resembles Windows Media Center, with a very blades-like interface. The interface now supports 1440x900 and 1680x1050 resolutions over a 16:10 aspect ratio over either VGA or HDMI when using DVI.

Oh, and there are now avatars. Microsoft took a serious cue from the Nintendo crowd who think that the Wii’s Miis are the bee’s knees. The massive popularity of the console’s avatars – a handful of pixels and polygons to represent one in the virtual realm – with the casual gamer crowd prompted the Redmond company to advance into the avatar area ASAP.

"The avatar [has become] the core of the entire casual gaming and community experience, which is why the console gang is chasing Nintendo on it," said Sean Ryan, chief executive of social network Meez

Hardcore gamers are unlikely to show massive interest in things like avatars, but for casual gamers, it is a powerful social tool. Community-based games and virtual communities like Gaia Online and Second Life are flourishing on that aspect alone.

In the end, NXE has its flaws, but is a work in progress, and a very promising work at that. Microsoft’s done some pretty interesting things with the console, and some won’t come into their own until the official launch when the community factor will set it. So see you then.