By now most of you have switched to the NXE, messing around with Avatars, trying out the Netflix integration, and partied yourselves to death with the Xbox Live Party feature.  As per my previous post, I’ve been messing with the various features of the NXE, and I’ve compiled a few items that I’d love to see fixed in the next release:

- We have completely lost the “Recommend to a friend” functionality in the dashboard.  This functionality was somewhat limited in the previous dashboard, but it was a step in the right direction; this is a step backwards.  Viral delivery of content is how our Web-oriented generation finds things (Youtube, anyone?), and to remove this instead of expand upon it is a bad move.  I was hoping to see this ability attached to ALL Marketplace content going forward, as well as the ability to rate content so that it is sortable by ratings.  (Curiously, we can now filter content by “Most Popular”, which would lend one to believe we would have more control over the popularity of an item…)

- The new Xbox Guide.  The functionality is great, but it is too damned blurry, plain and simple.  I’m not too sure of the technical reasons for this, but it’s especially offensive when overlayed upon the razor-sharp graphics of the NXE.  It looks ugly and almost a bit sloppy.

- On the subject of the low-res Xbox Guide, I’ve also noticed some strange holdovers from the previous dashboard.  Specifically (is this too picky?), it seems that whenever a game or video is launched, the resolution of the dashboard freaks out for a moment, then readjusts itself.  You’ll generally see any Xbox notifications dance about the screen for a moment while this is happening (since the screen has faded to black most times, it’s usally only your notifications or your IM window that does a jig).  Why is this?  I understand if something needs to be in a certain resolution, but isn’t the awesome thing about the HANA scaling chip in the 360 the fact that EVERYTHING scales to whatever resolution I choose?  The only excuse (and I’m not even that happy about it) is if the DVDs need to be downscaled because of the CSS standards (even then, I’d just rather the image be dithered to 480p and leave the overall resolution the same, but I digress).  It breaks up the overall flavor of the experience, and I was hoping a radical re-imagining of the OS would have solved this.

- Spotlight is my homepage?  Um, no.  I’m fine if you want to give this to me as the default, but let me change my start page in the Options.  (There is an indicator in the shape of a small dot to the left of your “homepage” in every menu, so it would be easy to denote this even if it was changed).  It’s really just a string of ads, and should not be where I start my Xbox Experience.

- There are still too many ways to receive video content on the Marketplace.  So far we have a total of three and a half different methods:

• The “Game Video” Marketplace method.  This processes a download in your normal download queue, and it is ready to watch when it completes downloading.  So 10 years ago.
• The Video Marketplace method.  This also processes a download in your normal download queue, but has an added intelligence to notify the user when the video is “Ready To Play”.  Better than the first option (especially for multi-gigabyte downloads like HD movie rentals), but hardly the experience most folks are accustomed to for on-demand content.
• The streaming video method.  This is the method used for the Inside Xbox videos, as well as some of the advertisements and trailers that are now fairly saturated into the NXE.  The “half” mentioned above is in reference to the in-tile streaming of trailers that I wrote about yesterday.  Too awesome, that.

I completely realize that over the last three years, these methods of video consumption have been in response to the evolving structure (and corresponding needs) of the Xbox ecosystem.  I’d also offer that having both a download option and a streaming option for videos is perfectly appropriate until every home in America has at least 50Mbps fiber run to it.  But I am crying out to the folks in Redmond to standardize the approach for video file access.

- Ubiquitous widescreen support!  This one probably sounds silly, but there are still places in the NXE where widescreen is not being taken into account.  The one that comes to mind at the time of this writing is the streaming video “buffer” screen.  Why in heavens’ green earth are the words Xbox Live and the buffering animation stretched?!  The alternative to this would of course be that this screen is letterboxed for owners of 4:3 TVs.  I’m sure you can guess where my preference falls…

This one might be a work-in-progress, but these are the hot items I have after a few days of use.  Any other points I missed?