HANDS ON GUIDE

Interface

The 360's OS, the Dashboard, looks nothing like Windows. It comprises a series of bright, colour-coded 'blades', a sensible response to the fact that movement with a gamepad rather than a mouse is far more tightly tied to horizontal and vertical axes. Flicking left and right with the pad's stick shuffles between blades as if they were giant cards in a Rolodex, with each card filling the screen and focusing on a specific subject, such as media or downloaded games. Irritatingly, navigating around each blade involves hopping between hotspots, which are arranged in a grid that's not entirely predictable. As a PC user, I missed the freedom of a mouse. The confusion is compounded by the fact that some blades mix adverts with links to stuff you've already downloaded.

When an event happens - such as friend signing in - a small message pops up, accompanied by the X graphic, which indicates that you can respond by holding the X button on the controller: simple and intuitive.

Getting to the Dashboard at any time is easy, and the 360 does a good job of explaining the implications of your actions - if it needs to quit a game to perform a task, for example. In this respect, it's better than the PS3, which often leaves you guessing. For instance, you can set MP3s playing on the PS3 and then navigate around the main menu, but if you go to the PlayStation Store, the music suddenly stops. On the other hand, you can set a demo downloading from the Store, and then play an album.

That said, the PS3's System Software looks far cleaner than the 360's Dashboard. Its interface is organised around the clumsily named but elegant Xross Media Bar (XMB). The XMB spans the screen horizontally with icons pegged to it. The icon in the centre of the screen drops down a vertical list of its contents, so if it's music, for example, you'll see albums and media servers, or for games you'll see downloaded titles and whichever disc is in the drive. Scroll down, hit the one you want and it loads. As the XMB has one background and doesn't change colour, font or layout until you focus on a game disc or file, it feels more grown-up than the 360's Dashboard, and more like a real computer. It isn't too showy, and its simple lists are easier to navigate than the 360's system of blades and unpredictable hotspots.

The PS3 does a reasonable job of the simple file management tasks for which a mouse is better suited. You can copy files and group them, two features that the 360 lacks. However, the XMB is all but unreadable at standard TV resolutions, which is tricky when that's the default. Worse, using a gamepad to scroll vertically through an alphabetised list becomes impractical when the list is over a certain length. There's a reason why magazines and books are divided into pages, and why mouse pointers move at such speed and with such precision. Using the PS3 to look through my 42GBs of MP3s on my server was painful. After a while, I gave up listening to anything other than Arcade Fire and the Beatles - getting to the White Stripes took too long. One final annoyance with the PS3's interface is the default RSS ticker, which displays such cheery and essential news stories as 'Have a Blu-ray Christmas'. At least you can turn it off.

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