It’s notorious that the only good things about the Microsoft presentation on the E3 were the Project Natal Kinect addon and the NEW XBOX 360.

The features on the Kinect were widely covered, so let’s take a little look on the XBOX360;

At first sight it’s a playstation3-slim-ation of ye olde whitey; Wifi N, 250GB HDD, and Whisper Silent (finally, I was sick of the noise!) which is nice, and needed for the time being.

From the press animation available on the XBOX Site there are a few frames in which you can see the back of the console; so I did this:

It’s pretty cool actually, because at first sight you can see 4 USB Ports, instead of 1 (on the backside only), optical audio output, and a what seems to be a redesigned Power input, possibly to a redesigned (smaller) Power Brick.

Now, that’s a lot of USB Ports, considering this new XBOX360 Slim still carries that little cap on the front in where reside the wonders of two usb ports HERE:

So, what would all these USB ports be for: one for Kinetic, one for a USB Storage Device (which it’s proven to be a lot faster than attachable HDD)

It seems that they’re doing it right this time they, remember with Rock Band, you need a USB HUB? Well, not anymore. Remember when you wanted to play movies from your external HDD on your XBOX, you needed to plug it indecorously on the USB ports on the front? (if you had a VERY EXPENSIVE Wifi Adapter) Well, not anymore.

Good for you, Microsoft.

After having solved (or found the cause of) the issue of the video quality, I installed the 5.1 reciever that came with the combo.

It’s very pretty, an LG HT-353sd.

A very basic design, doesn’t have much options to have audio in, or much power to take the audio out really loud. Good thing it’s it works.

Since I’m not into having wires all around my room, I went classic style and set up the thingie only with my good old pair of fatass speakers (which sound amazingly when not overloaded with bass) with the subwoffer the unit came with, to remove bass load from the fatass speakers.. and oh god it sounds like it should !

I’m very happy with the way it sounds, the radio is easy to use and the remote has a good size and button distribution, etc. Nicely.

After messing a while with the radio I went in to setup the DVD with the tv.

At first it did look great, the splash menu, the inner menues, the options; the audio setup tool is very complete, you can set the distance the speaker is from you, the volume, the sound eq. preset, and others I don’t remember. The video options was a bit more limited, tho. Then I went to the Zone setup, and replaced the code country with 0000, then the country code set it to ZZ. After playing and lurking found the key sequence to access the info screen, with the current firmware, zonelock, that kind of information, and found out that the DVD Zone was 0. (will never know if it was because of the factory being setting them as 0, or I unlocked it by changhing the country code to 0000)

turned it on, and had a very sad discovery. After having had a great time unwrapping, setting up, and playing around discovered the sad fact that the DVD Video quality is very lousy on a giant ass lcd tv. =( My old Master-G (supermarket brand) 35usd DVD player looks far betterer, both connected via component with the same cable.

So I didn’t complicate my life too much and I just left both DVDs, the 5.1 component is now a replacement for my old-bigass radio, and a cd player, or mp3, or whatever (it’s usb too) And my old DVD will be that while I get a bluray player or a ps3. Whatever happens first.

later.