Well, now that i have established I could careless what each system is packing inder the hood (weaker systems have never been a problem before. ps2 vs xbox, gameboy went for less impressive hardware for battery life and look at how he ended up). Any way i thought i would share with you my thoughts on the two navigation units for the two power house next gen units.

first XMB (cross media bar) on the PS3:

This is probably the cleaner design of the two, making a nice smooth transition between each of the sections. within each colom theres a number of options to choose from that end up being the colums rows. this system is clean and efficent, but not always the most user friendly (navigating sub menues and then finding out you have to hit things like triangle to open up another submenu that gives you even more options can at times be kinda clumsy). some ps3 games save textures and such things on the HDD so that the game can load faster, and untill a couple days ago when i was searching for these files to delete them off my HDD did i actually find where such things are saved. so the XMB looks nice, works well for the casual user. but finding where things are and sub menus can be a pain.

next System Blades on the X360:

this system works strangely like the XMB, where you choose what menu you want from left to right, from the marketplace blade, xbl blade, game blade, multimedia blade, and system blade, each of which has a nicely laid out menu that shows you all of the options (usually) or indicates theres more to the list in some way. the way the menus are structured is much prefered over the XBL. to where the system blade gives you access of all setting about your system. from memory management to changing the time on your system. its well thought out and user friendly by keeping things in a nice organized order. the only complaint i have about the system blade system, is it seems sluggish compared to the XMB. perhaps the system blade system loads the blades as you switch between them while the XMB is fully loaded when you acess it?