It’s been a long week for me. I’ve been pretty busy with lot’s of action on the Xbox and Zune to keep me up late nights. I installed the New Xbox Experience and did a run through video of sorts. It’s kinda weak but the best I could get with my crap internet connection.I’ll upload some more this week and a better review of the new user interface later but for now I must say it’s a huge improvement. There is so much more stuff in the Xbox console that they really did have to streamline the interface.

The coolest feature so far has been the Xbox Avatar that I was able to configure with my own look and style. The Avatar can be used in select games from the XNA community but I have not been able to download any games as of yet. I’ve been to darn busy at work blogging about Zune and all the great Zune News of the week. It was a big week in the Zune universe for sure. We had lots of rumors on a ZunePhone with everyone claiming there would be an announcement at the CES in January but those rumors were squashed this morning when Gizmodo announced that the Zune team has confirmed there will be no Zune Phone at CES.

Of course that just mans that MS is not planning on making their own phone but we should expect to see Zune software integrated with Windows Mobile for a portable Microsoft gaming platform on millions of smartphones around the world. The Microsoft Project Pink is supposed to combine a premium set of mobile service into Windows Mobile 7 that may even include features from the New Xbox Experience as well. It looks like Microsoft has big plans for 2009 and we should expect a lot of development on the gaming front.