Yesterday, people who signed up for the early preview got an early look at the New Xbox Experience (NXE) and as of 2am this morning, the update has been available for all Xbox 360 owners. We here at Obsessable labs downloaded the upgrade this morning and have been kicking its tires a bit. Currently, there appear to be some problems with the Netflix integration (which is one of the new hot features of the upgrade). Trying to access the Netflix section on the Xbox 360 is returning an error that says: "Can't retrieve information from Xbox LIVE. Please try again later. Status code: 8007000e." Most likely this is a first day launch error where more people are trying to access the feature at once than would occur under normal Xbox Live network activity. This problem seems to be happening for everything appearing under the Video Marketplace section of the NXE. Even when the issue is resolved, the usefulness of the Netflix subscription has been crippled somewhat by Sony Pictures deciding to pull all their content from the offerings last minute. UPDATE: Thanks to Shaun in the comments below who notes that the 8007000e error occurs because you have to turn off the Xbox and restart it after the initial NXE installation to get the option to download the Netflix application.

Upon installation of the NXE, you are greeted with a new intro video at boot up (which is embedded via YouTube below). Then after signing into Xbox Live and agreeing to the terms of service, you are taken to a screen where you can design a new avatar for yourself. You can browse through your friends and see their avatars and some graphics associated with what games they have been playing recently. Browsing through your own gaming history is much more interesting in the NXE, as well, because all your games show up as cards with your different accomplishments noted, and you can easily toggle through all of them. Some games, like UNO, can now be played with your NXE avatar. 

This new friendlier, avatar-rich interface for the Xbox 360 is clearly an attempt by Microsoft to compete with the top-selling Nintendo Wii which relies heavily on an avatar-based system where players design their own Mii characters. So far, from just toying around with the NXE for about 20 minutes, the update would appear to be a great improvement in ease of navigation for all Xbox 360 owners with useful added features like the Netflix streaming; hopefully, over the next several days post launch of this update, Microsoft will stabilize the system so that Xbox Live customers can actually take advantage of these new multimedia features.

UPDATE: We've decided to celebrate the launch of the NXE by giving away an Xbox 360 Live Vision Camera to a randomly chosen winner. The contest launches now and will last until this Friday at 10am ET. The winner will be announced at noon on Friday. You must be a U.S. resident and 18 years or older to enter. Enter in the form below.