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At the demo I was at, they had about 30-40 360's none of which showed any sign of crashing, my guess would be they didn't have the "factory" firmware on them

To be fair, the one users photos and video seem to be pasted all over the internet making it seem like a much larger problem. Slashdot linked to 3 postings. Out of the launch units, this is still well below the norm for defective products. I think in this case it is just the tech media having fun poking at MS for no good reason. Really a slow news day I guess when they can't find a real issue to latch onto.

As far as the XBox 360 goes for me, I can confidently say it has the best online experience of any gaming platform, PC included. My friend had his unit up and running, and I grabbed the second controller to play with. In a few moments of setup, I had my XBox Live account online on his console bound to the second controller while his remained bound to the first controller. I started chatting with a friend online using the headset, and nothing done on controller one was interrupting it. This included playing Project Gothem, then exiting it and putting in Need for Speed. I was rather impressed with that alone, something that seems won't happen with the Playstation 3, and likely not the Revolution.

Microsoft nailed online gaming nearly perfectly. Combine Steam, XFire, and Skype, and make it work well and you have the new Live.

Oh, a cool feature on the new XBox. The XBox Marketplace offers downloads of quite a few things from skins and icons to video trailers or even game demos. Not only demos of the Arcade games like Gauntlet, but also the full store released games. Very cool use of the hard drive, and a great way to try out a future game without having to find a demo on some game magazine CD.

I'll post more of my impressions later. I decided to keep mine after one attempt on eBay. The prices plummeted from where I had my reserve set, so it didn't sell. That was pretty much my deciding factor on keeping it was if the market was going to fall that quickly on reselling them.