Xbox 360 Initial Review

Seeing as how Jesse's review of the 360 Controller has been up for months, I figured it was time for another review... The 360 itself

Pros: I love the dashboard, not only can you listen to your own music at any point during a game, but its actually somewhat intuitive. The 360 can finally rip music off burned CD's which was a major reason xbox 1.0 never really saw much use as a music player. The Controller is comfortable as heck, and the wireless thing is really nice and so far the battery life (the wireless controller uses 2 AA's) has been great, but I'm probably going to invest in some rechargeables. All in all, I do like that Microsoft decided to use AA's instead of some proprietary battery, far cheaper and easier to replace them that way.

The graphics are great, I've played Gears of War and the graphics are a deffinete step up from xbox 1.0, ps2, etc. Not only does the console have plenty of speed, but loading times are minimal compared to xbox 1.0. I also like the fact the 360 will have an add-on HD player, because i don't have or need HD-dvd, nor do i want to spend another $200 for one.

Cons: The HD is a bit small, while 20 gigs seems like a lot for a console, once you start ripping your own music onto the thing, it starts to pile up. I'm not anywhere near running out of room yet, but I can definitely see it happening to those with more impressive media collection. I'd like to see either a larger HD available, or an adapter allowing you to use a regular computer HD which would see storage capacity limited only by the size of the HD's available. I'd also wish they'd left the start and select buttons where they are on the xbox 1.0 controller, never realized how nice it was having them to the side till now. While in general I do like the dashboard, it'd be nice if you were able to customize the button settings for entering information. It'd also be nice to be able to fast forward and rewind within songs.

Nitpicking: I wish the controller was just a tad larger, like the size of the S controller that is standard with xbox 1.0, It's not that the controller is too small to use, but would be nice if they beefed it up just a bit.