I like my Xbox 360. But some things about the ownership experience annoy the hell out of me.
Premium Content
I like my Xbox 360 but I don’t feel I use it often enough to justify paying a premium to be an Xbox Live Gold member. As such I occasionally get excited when I hear that a new demo or piece of downloadable content is available, only to be told that it’s only available for Gold members when I try to download it. Would it kill Microsoft to put a little tag on it? A countdown in days for Silver members even?
The newly-added Twitter and Facebook integration? Also for Gold Members only, natch.
Deleting Content
I like to download trailers and demos every so often. My Xbox is an earlier model with a 20GB hard disk (of which only 13GB is available for user content) which gets filled up pretty quickly by such things, especially now that some games are offering entirely new chapters for download.
When scrolling down a list of (say) downloaded videos, I have to select the one I want to delete, press A, move down from “Play” to “Delete”, press A, change the selection from “No” to “Yes” and press A again. That’s five inputs on the controller. I would much prefer to see A = Select, B = Cancel/Back, X = Delete such that you press X once, it pops up a message saying “OK to delete? Press X again to confirm.” (Gamers generally have reasonably good hand-eye co-ordination – we don’t press buttons twice by accident.)
I’m sure that there are probably half a dozen other places in the Dashboard UI where other buttons could be usefully employed as direct ways to do things instead of scrolling through options one at a time.
Hardware Costs
If I want to upgrade my hard disk from the bog-standard 20GB, Microsoft offers a 120GB upgrade for about £100, which is a 2.5″ form factor drive in a fancy-looking plastic box. At the time of writing I can buy a brand new 160GB 2.5″ hard drive for about £30. £100 would net me a 640GB drive with enough change for a couple of pints. I’m not really feeling the value for money here.
Should I have the temerity to desire that my Xbox communicate wirelessly, Microsoft can accommodate me with the Xbox 360 wireless network adaptor, a snip at £45 (£60 RRP). It cost me about £20 to add the same functionality to my PC. (And what’s this? A newer faster better adaptor, supporting 802.11n? Also £60. Sigh.)
Media Handling
If you want to play videos from a network source on the 360, the interface lets you browse through folders and select a file. If you want to play music, it insists on reading all the ID3 tags before you can do anything. This is really dumb if (as I do) you have very many music files and you want to play one right now, thank you. (Maybe this is something to do with the 360 requiring a uPNP/DLNA server to talk to?)
Oh, and good luck playing that Quicktime video file, pal. NIH in action.
