I really like how it's possible to chat in a group now. I can recall tons of times that I've joined a group of friends' game only to be on the opposite team and only be able to talk with one at a time. This is by far the best thing about this update in my opinion, it's extremely nice being able to talk to all your friends at once even when playing different games.

My second favorite thing about this update has got to be the new guide. It reminds me of the old dashboard, but is smaller and can be accessed while playing games easily. Now it won't be necessary for users to go to the main dashboard as frequently.

Aside from this, the other features are alright. The Netflix feature seems neat, but I doubt I'll ever use it. Still, for those that plan to use it, this will be a much faster way to get movies without having to wait until they are arrive with the mail. Aside from the uniqueness of this new opportunity, there are some downside to it from what I have read. Certain locations will not support this new feature, which will hopefully be changed in the future.

Some of the other features that I also think are nice are seeing what other games people are playing, since now it shows all the avatars playing just "xxx" game. Also, I like how you can view things going from right to left instead of having to go to something, press A, and wait a few seconds for it to load. Now you can basically view almost everything at once.

Now while this update is by far the best, there are some things that I really don't like about it. The main one is the avatars. It's kind of cool, and I like how they will be integrated with some games but I already have a feeling that Microsoft is going to use these avatars to make money. Something tells me that pretty soon when more clothing and items become available for the avatars, it will cost microsoft points to get the items, and I've already noticed that the few games that have integrated avatars into them already cost just as much as any other arcade game. I guess that is to be expected, but it would still be nice to have something to do with the avatars that won't cost money.

While on the subject of the avatars, many people have complained about the avatars being copied from the Miis for the Nintendo Wii, so I will give my view on the matter. I've got both an Xbox 360 and a Wii, so I've been able to use both, and in my opinion, to a certain extent the avatars are better for certain things, like being able to give them various items and such, but are also worse in that a lot of facial customization is limited. I have always loved how with the Nintendo Wii you can customize your Mii's to the point where they can look extremely weird, with messed up faces, or even look as your favorite character from a TV show, game, etc. Perhaps it's just me, but I see the avatars as less customizable in actual facial looks. I won't claim the Mii's to better than the avatars, especially since it's too early to see what Microsoft will do with these avatars, but I do see the Mii's and the Wii in general to be a success, considering it managed to make Microsoft create something similar.

The other feature that I see as pointless is the installing games to your hard drive feature. While it seems like a good idea at first, since it does actually reduce load times in games and gets rid of lag, it also takes a TON of memory. I checked out in another website a list that showed for several games, the amount of memory that would be taken by installing it to the hard drive, and how much the performances would be improved in the games. For some games, I noticed that it did cut load times by half and get rid of almost all lag, however, the average amount of memory it took for most of the games shown on the list was about 5 to 6 GB. For a user such as myself with just the regular 20 GB hard drive, installing just one game would take about 25% of the hard drive's memory (this is saying if the game were to be about the size that I mentioned earlier). There are even some other games that I've seen that take anywhere from 10 GB to 20 GB of memory on the hard drive when you install them. For those curious to see a list for most games, here is a link.

Needless to say however, aside from a few new features, the new Xbox 360 dashboard seems to be a very nice improvement, and by far the best one that Microsoft has done.