New Xbox experience incoming

Announced way back in July, the Xbox 360's ground-breaking dashboard redesign took a couple of steps closer to release this week.

NEW XBOX EXPERIENCE

An ad on the current version of the dashboard popped up this week, indicating Xbox owners can expect to see the revamp -- which completely overhauls the look, feel and featureset of the console's interface -- debuting sometime in November.

Also, Xbox Live will be down altogether on September 29, for "maintenance" -- and although Xbox team blogger Major Nelson emphasized they won't be adding any new features just yet, he did admit it's "in preparation" for the so-called New Xbox Experience.

The new dashboard boasts a completely new look and feel, including a Wii-like interface for creating your own "avatar" characters, and will allow you to copy your Xbox games to the machine's hard drive for faster load times during play. Netflix subscribers are also anxiously awaiting the update: it'll allow them to stream movies from Netflix directly to the console -- no extra hardware needed.

It also abandons the 360's original "blade" interface in favor of a cleaner and less cluttered look that, Microsoft hopes, will help users navigate the packed selection of content available over Xbox Live.

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