New Xbox 360 experience coming early for some

Surprise!

The official launch date for the new Xbox 360 dashboard is this Wednesday (Nov. 19th). But Major Nelson's blog reports that if you signed up for the preview successfully but didn't get in you will have received access late yesterday. 48 hours before everyone else.

Instead of adding another 10,000 people to the preview program like we did last week, we've decided to do something a little different: everyone who successfully applied to the preview program (and submitted a valid console ID) will be getting the New Xbox Experience sometime within the next few hours. That’s right…we’re hooking everyone else up with NXE a bit early.

I thought I had signed up but I didn't see anything yesterday. Maybe this evening.

I suspect that Microsoft's surprise bonus has little to do with a bonus gift and more to do with lightening the server load on the 19th and getting some last minute beta testing.