A superb media machine, the Xbox One has lots of potential
The Xbox One is Microsoft's third games console and certainly its most ambitious to date.
Not
just a powerful games machine, it's designed to sit at the centre of
your digital home, offering a slick, unified interface for your choice
of live TV service alongside music and movie streaming options, Skype
chats, catch-up TV and more.
It's also received a £30 price cut in February 2014, and now costs £399.99. If you're quick you can get it with a free copy of Titanfall as well.
Coming
with the new version of Kinect by default, voice and gesture controls
sit at the heart of everything and offer a step up in reliability and
performance from the previous generation.
If you're not
going to play a game, you no longer need to use the gamepad to turn the
console on or navigate to your entertainment of choice.
Still, does it have a chance at the runaway success of the Xbox 360? Or will it trip over its own £399.99 price tag (down from £429.99 of course).
Design
The Xbox One box is very similar to that of
the Xbox 360 - big, fiddly and frustrating. While the PS4 comes with
minimal packaging, the Xbox One comes bundled with far more cardboard
and plastic. It's very American in this regard and does at least feel
like a premium product.
The first thing you'll notice about the console when you get
it out of the enormous box is what an absolute beast it is in its own
right. It measures 274 x 79 x 333 mm, making it longer and taller than a
PlayStation 4 or an Xbox 360. You don't need a tape measure to figure
that out though, the thing just looks huge, and it's ugly too.
Its
size and girth harkens back to the original Xbox, an imposing black
plastic beast covered in black plastic ridges. Microsoft seems to be
throwing back to that design, bringing back the all black and the
ridge-covered aesthetic.
It's
massive size and black rectangular construction evoke a stereo tuner
from the nineties. Its imposing bulk begs to be hidden away, with just
its slot loading disc drive exposed, little white Xbox logo glowing in
lonely TV cabinet darkness.
Flip
the machine around and you'll see a plethora of ports. It has all your
standard nodes: ethernet, HDMI out, power, S/PDIF (commonly used for
optical audio), dual USB 3.0 ports and an IR out. Additionally, there
are two proprietary ports, one for hooking in the Kinect, and an
HDMI-in, which is how you feed the Xbox One your cable or satellite
signal. There's also a third USB 3.0 port found on the system's right
side.
The
HDMI-in can function as a passthrough and let any old HDMI signal in,
but there's a slight delay that makes it no good for hooking in another
console.
Kinect
You can't talk Xbox One without
bringing up the new Kinect. While the system can operate without being
hooked into Microsoft's magic eye, you'd be losing a lot of its most
unique features and showroom wow factor.
The
new Kinect is a whole lot bigger than its predecessor. It's also
designed to sit in front of your TV, rather than perched on top of the
screen like the PlayStation Camera. It's too big and, presumably, delicate for that.
Just
like the system itself, it has a white light up logo on its right side.
Dull red lights from its IR blaster intermittently glow when it's
active.
What's in the box?
The hardware
Under the Xbox One's hood is an eight-core AMD CPU, 8GB of DDR3 RAM and a
GPU clocked at 853 MHz. The Xbox One's specs trail the PS4's only
slightly, but it's important to keep in mind this was the case last
generation as well. Both consoles' architectures are more closely
constructed this generation, so for the most part we'll likely see
similar graphical performance. There are somewhat noticeable differences
from time to time and it's certainly possible this will grow as the
consoles age. For example, Tomb Raider runs at 60 frames per second on
PlayStation 4, but only puts out 30 fps on Xbox One.
The
Xbox One is significantly bulkier and notably less sleek than the
PlayStation 4; some have described it as a retrofitted VCR. Quite
frankly it's not really anything special to look at, though the glowing
white Xbox logo on the right panel is oddly soothing.
One ugly carryover from the 360 is the Xbox One's external power
brick. That's in contrast to the trim PS4, which manages to keep its
power supply tucked inside.
The Xbox weighs around 8 pounds and measures in at 13.5 inches wide
by 10.4 inches deep by 3.2 inches tall, but it doesn't go as deep as the
PS4 (10.8 inches by 12 inches by 2 inches). Unlike the PS4, the Xbox
One's internal 500GB hard disk is not user-replaceable. Wireless Xbox
One features include 802.11n and Wi-Fi Direct, but there's no built-in
Bluetooth support.
The box is littered with vents on top and around the sides. Xbox One
is designed to be on nearly 24-7, if only because it sits in line
between your cable box and TV. I've had the console on more often than
not when I've been home, and impressively enough, the machine barely
makes any noise. (That's a far cry from the jet-engine din of the
original Xbox 360 consoles.)
Kinect
2.0 is bundled into the Xbox One system and is meshed into the
console's operating system, more so than the PS4's PlayStation Camera
(an optional $60 upgrade to the Sony system). Kinect is not required for
operation, but Microsoft is never shy to heavily recommend attaching
the device during the initial setup. The camera and microphone array
take up a little more space than one of those old-school industrial
Swingline staplers, so finding a spot for it shouldn't be too much of a
task. Be warned, though, unlike the PS4 camera, you can't put the Kinect
on top of your TV; that could be especially problematic if you have a
sound bar at the base of your screen.
When it's powered on, you'll notice three infrared (IR) blasting
beacons emanating from the front of the Kinect. In fact, the Xbox One
can send and receive IR commands, which means it can both control
your TV and audio receiver or sound bar (to a degree), and accept
commands from a standard universal remote. (The PS4 can do neither, even
with its camera connected.) Note, however, that the Xbox's database of
control codes isn't comprehensive; we already found some mainstream TVs
that it wasn't able to control.
Around back is a collection of ports: an HDMI-in and -out (for live
TV integration), an optical audio port, two USB 3.0 slots (plus one on
the left side for a total of three), the Kinect attachment interface, a
slot for an IR blaster, and an Ethernet port. The IR slot is for owners
who don't have line-of-sight (if their devices are behind a closed
cabinet, for example) between their Kinect and AV devices. For these
setups, a wire (not included) must manually run from the console to
these devices so they can receive IR commands.
An Xbox One media remote control with more device compatibility will be available in March for $25. We'll have a separate review of it when it arrives.
Xbox One must lie horizontally, unlike the Xbox 360 and the
PlayStation 3 and 4. Finally, standard-definition TV owners are out of
luck; the Xbox One only connects digitally via HDMI.
Setup
Xbox
One setup is more involved than on the PS4, but it's still not terribly
complex. Along with power and HDMI, you'll also have to connect the
Kinect through its proprietary cable.
If you plan to
watch TV on the console, you'll do so with an HDMI cable, through the
system's HDMI-in port. You'll then need to run the OneGuide's setup,
which isn't too complex. We'll get into that in the media portion of
this review.
When you first switch the system on you'll
be met with a setup wizard which will get you connected to the internet
for that day one patch. It's around 2GB, and absolutely required before
you can even get to the Home screen.
After that's done
don't go unplugging your router just yet, at least if you want to play
Blu-rays. Almost nothing is on the system by default, and while internet
access is not required for single player gaming, there's a ton of
functionality that still needs come down from the cloud.
Hop
into the Store and get those downloads queued up. After that though,
setup is complete. Now before we dive deep into the Xbox One, allow us
to walk you through some of its big new functions.
Snap
The Xbox One's tiled Home screen is a dead giveaway that the interface shares some DNA with Windows 8. Its brought one of the unique features of the Metro UI to your TV screen in the form of app snapping.
Snapping
lets you run two apps at once, giving a third of the screen to one app
off to the right, and the rest to your primary engagement. It's a good
way to do a little Internet Explorer browsing while you wait for a
friend to join your game, but beyond that it can be straining on the
eyes.
First off, on all but the biggest TVs, a third of
the screen just isn't enough space to do much of anything. Having FIFA
on one side and an actual live match on the other may sound intriguing,
but in practice it's cramped and terribly distracting. Snapping is
better left to simpler apps, like the browser or answering a Skype call.
It's
also a headache in execution because it requires multiple trips to the
home screen. First to load up the primary app, then to back out and
choose snap, after which you pick your secondary app.
Kinect
makes it easier, allowing to simply say "Xbox snap Skype" to get the
side by side feature working. It's also much easier to just say "switch"
for toggling between the two rather using the controller.
Also,
once an app is unsnapped, you lose all its functionality. Skype calls
hang up, Xbox Music stops playing, basically you're forced to give up
precious visual real estate for this debatably useful function.
While
it's impressive that the Xbox One's hardware is capable of juggling all
this with a drop in gaming performance, it comes off as something you
can do, but not something you'll actually want to do, at least very
often.
Game DVR
Game
DVR could be the end of gaming tall tales and "you had to be there"
stories. With help from Microsoft's SkyDrive service, it lets you easily
record and share your personal epic wins.
It's much
simpler than third-party recording devices since it's built directly
into the system, and can grab your finest moments just after they
happen. Simply say "Xbox record that" to Kinect and a 720p recording of
your last thirty seconds in-game is saved to the hard drive. You can
also get up to five minutes of footage but you have to plan ahead by
snapping the Game DVR feature.
Like the recording on the PS4,
game DVR cannot record on the Home screen, and developers do have the
choice to disable it at certain moments, in case they don't wont
spoilers to pop up online.
Unlike the PS4, which keeps a
running archive of your last fifteen minutes of gameplay, the Xbox One
is not constantly recording. However, games can be programmed to
automatically engage the DVR. Battlefield 4, for example, records when
you rank up or earn an achievement.
The
Xbox One does allow more complete access to your recordings than the
PS4. Using upload studio you can send the recording to SkyDrive,
Microsoft's answer to Dropbox, and download it your PC as an MP4. You
can then edit it using any tools you like, and upload the clip anywhere
you choose. That's a lot more freedom than the on PS4, which limits you
to Facebook or PSN uploads.
You can also share clips on
Xbox Live where they will appear on in your activity feed. Those feeds
are rather buried though, so chances are your friends won't see it
unless you give them a heads up.
Upload Studio also has a
simple suite of editing tools, and allows you to record a voice over
commentary. You can even use Kinect recording to place yourself in the
video, picture-in-picture style.
While
the Xbox One currently has no built-in live streaming capabilities to
match the PS4's Twitch and Ustream support, we think players will
appreciate having direct access to their clips, which greatly extends
the possibilities of editing and sharing.
Smartglass
Smartglass
is the Xbox's second screen experience. It was introduced on the Xbox
360 and lets you navigate menus and see system information on your
tablet or smartphone.
The app is back for Xbox One, and
does have improved functionality. You can now launch apps from the
second screen, and several games now have companion apps. Dead Rising 3
lets you use your device in lieu of the in-game phone for ordering
attacks and calling for back. You can even view the in-game map.
The
best service Smartglass provides is a keyboard that's easier than the
console's on-screen option. It's a great way to read and respond to
messages. You can also type in URLs and operate Bing search this way,
which is an excellent way to multitask. You can also use the OneGuide on
Smartglass for TV control.
The Windows 8 Smartglass app
has its own special features. You can throw a browser page from the
console directly onto the screen of your W8 device.
Also,
its online requirement, which threatened to lock up the system without a
daily server ping, has been dialed way, way down. Out of the box, your
Xbox One will need to download a day one patch before you even arrive at
the homescreen. After that, you can cut the ethernet cable or smash
your router; there's no further online connectivity needed for single
player gaming.
Controller
The Xbox 360's controller was widely
regarded as the best all around console gamepad. Its natural contours,
well placed triggers and asymmetrical stick layout made it comfortable
and the right fit for games of all kinds.
Moving from the
360 to the One, Microsoft has altered little about its signature
controller. The most noticeable change is the new position of the Xbox
button, which is now at the top rather than in the middle, making it
harder to hit by accident.
Basically,
Microsoft chose not to mess with a good thing and stuck to improving
the existing design. It's now lighter, with a matte finish that feels
sleek in the hand. The analog sticks are extra grippy thanks to textured
rubber.
There's also force feedback in the triggers,
letting you feel the kick of a gun or the rumble of off-road driving
right in your fingers. Right now it's a bit of gimmick, but you never
know what some clever developer might do with it.
Comparing
the two side-by-side, we prefer the Xbox One's controller to PS4's
DualShock 4. However, Sony's controller has a few features we wish
Microsoft would had adopted.
The Xbox One is still using
AA batteries for power, while Sony has been building a rechargeable cell
right into its controller since the DualShock 3. Microsoft sells that
functionality separately in the form of the Play and Charge Kit. At £19,
it's asking a lot, since extra controllers are already £44 a pop.
The
Xbox One's controller doesn't have any motion features, unlike the
DualShock 4, which basically has Move built right in. It's forgivable
since you have a Kinect, but we do think that the PS4's touchpad gives
it an edge, both for casual gaming and manipulating big inventory
screens.
Overall, the Xbox One controller is an
improvement in every way except one: the shoulder buttons. The actions
on the Xbox One's bumpers are less taught. It makes for a flimsier
click, which is a real shame, since the One controller trumps the 360's
build quality in every other way.
With
the exception of that annoying flaw, the Xbox One has a really
excellent controller. It's a pleasure to hold, the batteries last just
as long as the last-gen version and making black the standard color was a
wise choice, since it won't discolor as readily as the 360's white
model.
Kinect
The
Xbox One's Kinect is a combination camera and microphone. It lets the
system see you, hear you, react to your commands or just your presence.
It also has an IR blaster that can interact with your TV and other
appliances.
While Microsoft has taken pains to assure the
public that the Kinect is not required for using the Xbox One, ignore
it and you'd be missing out. After all, it's going to be in the box no
matter what; it's the reason Xbox One is £50 more than the PS4.
Physically,
it's bigger than the Xbox 360's Kinect. It's wider, heavier, more
rectangular and cannot be mounted to the top of your TV, at least not
as-is out of the box. Also, unlike the 360's Kinect, it doesn't move on
its own to keep you in frame. Microsoft has replaced that slightly
unnerving feature with an optical zoom. The Kinect can be manually
tilted, but you only need to do so during the initial setup.
There's
a wizard that makes calibration quite painless and only needs to be
repeated if you make major changes to your living room setup. The first
time you run it you'll introduce Kinect to your face. Once seems to be
enough, the Kinect was shockingly good at picking people out beneath
glasses and facial hair.
Some checks do need to be
repeated if you move the Kinect: making sure it can see enough of the
floor and that the mic is tuned to hear you. The system will ask you to
crank up your speakers so it can blast a few notes for a sound check.
This makes sure Kinect can hear you over the TV. This whole setup
process takes less than five minutes.
The Kinect sees you
and hears you, letting you navigate menus with your voice or gesture
commands. Being able to go from the first Home screen to your pins with a
wave is nice, but beyond that the onscreen hand cursor is more trouble
than it's worth. It's twitchy and doesn't recognize a "press" very well.
For
voice commands, the Kinect's mic can reliably hear you over TV audio,
but conversation and background noise gives it trouble. It's best used
when there's little going on in the room besides playing Xbox. You also
need to stick to rather rigid command syntax so it understands you.
Everything
you say has to begin with "Xbox." "Xbox go to Forza Motorsport 5" will
launch said racing game. It sounds simple enough but you'll find plenty
of ways to trip over it. For example, saying play rather than go to, or
Forza instead of the game's entire name. Kinect is no Siri when it comes
to interpreting the way people actually talk.
A lot of
the command phrasing isn't terribly intuitive either. For example, "Xbox
on" turns on the system, but "Xbox turn off" switches it off.
Forgetting to say "turn" or putting it where it doesn't belong usually
results in no response from the Kinect.
Hopefully
Kinect's voice commands will improve and become less rigid over time.
Siri and Google Now have certainly come a long way. As of now, Xbox
One's interface jammed with tutorials and lists of phrases; Microsoft
knows there's a lot to learn and it's doing its best to compensate. See a
full list of Kinect commands here.
Kinect
makes a lot of basic functions convenient and fun. Pausing a movie,
returning to the home screen and switching between snapped apps worked
quite well. However, anything beyond simple commands can quickly get
frustrating.
The least reliable command is ironically
the most basic. We frequently found ourselves saying "Xbox on" several
times before the system would come to life. While it would sometimes
snap to attention at first utterance, we never what we had done right,
or wrong.
Also, while you can easily setup the Kinect's
IR blaster to automatically power on your TV, it might be a good option
to skip. If your TV is already on when you say "Xbox On," it'll turn it
off. A lot of universal remotes have the same problem.
At
its best the Kinect compliments the Xbox One's interface by giving you
options. You can go between speech, gestures and controller input
without even bothering to tell the Kinect "stop listening." The bevy of
options is impressive, and amusing.
Don't
think that the Kinect is ever not listening though. This thing can turn
on the system, remember? It's basically in standby all the time. While
we think that Microsoft has better things to do than monitor what people
are up to in their living rooms, the idea of an always on microphone is
a bit disconcerting in the era of the NSA.
You can opt
of out of using the Kinect by simply leaving it in the box, but you
can't opt out of paying for it. That's a shame for gamers that would
rather put that $100 toward games or a spare controller, but at least it
gives a developers a major incentive to design for it. The Kinect's
install base will undoubtedly be larger than that of the sold
separately, and comparatively underpowered, PlayStation 4 Camera.
Microsoft's bid for living room supremacy is powered by an
AMD processor, backed by 8GB of DDR3 and 32MB of ultra fast ESRAM. For
storage, there's a 500GB hard drive to keep your media, gameplay videos
and game installs. Unlike the PlayStation 4,
there's no swapping out that mechanical drive for solid state without
considerable trouble, and letting your warranty fly right out the
window.
Speaking of windows, if you've used Windows 8,
the Xbox One's interface will look familiar. It's made up of tiles and
divided into three sections: Pins, Home and Store. It's somewhat
customizable, letting you pick the color of said tiles, but mostly works
by automatically populating itself with your recently accessed apps and
games.
Interface
Home
is the first thing you'll see when you turn on your Xbox, or hit the
Xbox button on the controller. It devotes a large front and center
rectangle to whatever you're currently doing. Whether it's a game, an
app or TV, you'll see a live preview of it in the middle of the screen.
If you just booted up, it'll show the last app you used.
The
current app preview is flanked on the left by a strip for your Xbox
Live profile. It provides fresh information about your Gamerscore and
friends list.
The
rest of Home is covered in tiles for other recently accessed apps.
Besides your Live profile and the current app preview, Snap and My games
& apps are the other permanent residents. There's also a tile
representing the disc drive, and three large Featured tiles.
Currently,
the Featured section is filled with tutorials for the Xbox One. We're
not sure what kind of content it will host in the future, be we wouldn't
be surprised if advertisements started to hang out there.
To
the left of the Home screen you'll find your Pins, a favorites list you
can customize with games, apps or TV shows. You may remember pins from
the Xbox 360, but they're far more convenient and powerful on the Xbox
One.
For one thing, they're practically living on the
Home screen, just a scroll to the left away, while the 360 tucked them
into their own folder. Being able to save a specific show or TV channel
to Pins is the Xbox One's media integration at its most convenient.
To
the right of the Home screen is the Store. It's divided into Games,
Movies & TV, Music and Apps. There's also a Bing search bar below
it. The layout is attractive and the placement is unobtrusive. We're
just glad that it's been relegated to its own screen, away from the more
personal Home and Pins.
When you're in an app or game,
returning to the Home screen is as simple as pressing the Xbox button on
the controller. Games are automatically paused, while videos and live
TV continue to play, creating a sort of picture in picture effect.
Of
course, the whole interface can also be navigated by Kinect, using
either gestures or voice commands. The Xbox One's interface does have
its unintuitive moments, and the Kinect compensates for them nicely.
We're not sure why Settings has been folded into My games & apps,
but being able to shout "Xbox go to Settings" saves you from having to
remember that.
Currently,
notifications aren't getting the sort of prominence they deserve.
They're packed into a globe icon in the upper left of the screen. Same
goes for your Xbox Live friends feed, which is stored in another small
icon right next to it. It's easy to miss gameplay videos shared by your
friends, or an invitation to join a game.
Cramming all
this important and fun information into tiny little icons really makes
the Featured section of Home feel like a waste of space. We'd much
rather have game invitations pop up there, rather than tutorials or
whatever else is on its way.
When it comes to booting up,
the Xbox One is very fast because it doesn't really turn off unless you
unplug it. Holding down the Xbox button and selecting console off
really just puts it in standby mode.
Surely the Xbox One
needs this hidden standby functionality both for better performance, and
so the Kinect can listen for your "Xbox on" command. It does stand in
contrast to the PS4, which lets you choose to either go into standby, or
completely turn the system off. Fully shutting down your PS4 also locks
you out of cool features, like PS Vita Remote Play, or starting a download from the mobile app.
Coming
out of standby, the Xbox One takes only twenty seconds to reach the
Home screen. Kinect will have you signed in by then as well, unless
you're sitting too far back. We sometimes had to lean forward before it
recognized us.
From a full, unplugged shut down, the Xbox
One takes a less impressive minute and seven seconds. Honestly though,
there's no reason why you should be frequently unplugging your Xbox One.
We just think it's odd that console off really means standby.
So
while not every design choice is transparent, you can't accuse the Xbox
One's interface of being sluggish. There's no pop in on the Home
screen, and overall navigation is snappy. You can drill through menus
and browse your library as quickly as you can manipulate the D-pad, or
bark at the Kinect.
Multitasking is where the Xbox One
really shines. The system keeps your last three apps suspended, letting
you switch between them with nary a stutter.
What's
surprising is how little is on the system when you first get it. When
you first use your Xbox One you'll frequently click on a tile, only to
discover you don't actually have the corresponding app yet. Out of the
box, almost nothing is pre-installed. That makes sense for third-party
services, but apps like Game DVR, Xbox Video, even the Blu-ray playing
software need to be downloaded and installed.
It's not
such a big deal, just a telling indication of how internet reliant this
new generation of gaming will be. Be sure get all your pertinent apps
downloaded before having friends over to show off the new system.
Games
Every
game on the Xbox One requires at least a partial installation before it
can be played. These installs are lengthier than on PlayStation 4, but
not by much.
For example, a disc copy of Madden for Xbox
One needed six minutes to reach 25% installation before letting us on
the gridiron. The PS4 version needed two minutes, and an additional
minute to download a patch before online features were enabled.
Installing
isn't a major roadblock on either system, but it is something to
anticipate. It's a good idea to pop a new game in the drive the minute
you get home. That way you can be sure it'll be ready when you are.
One
advantage the Xbox One has over the PS4 is that discs are not required
to play. Once a game has been installed, the system won't ask for it
when it's selected from the menu. It's a convenient feature, if nothing
else, and makes using the Xbox One feel pleasantly self-contained.
Getting
to graphics and gameplay, a lot has been made of the fact that many
third-party games run in full 1080p on the PS4, while the Xbox One
versions are 720p. There are indeed sharper visuals to be found on the
PS4's versions of Battlefield 4, Call of Duty: Ghosts and Assassin's
Creed: Black Flag, but you need a keen eye to tell the difference.
Character
models often have more detailed textures, and lighting effects can be
slightly more impressive on the PS4. However, performance across the two
systems is very similar, with equally smooth framerates and load times
that are close in length.
The 720p vs 1080p situation is
still troubling, Microsoft will need to close this visual gap in future
releases. It's something we'll be keeping an eye on as we update this
review down the line.
The
Xbox One has first-party games that show off just as much graphical
gusto as the PS4. Ryse: Son of Rome and Forza Motorsport 5 are just as
gorgeous as anything currently available from Sony. Dead Rising 3 is a
bit behind the beauty curve but the sheer number of zombies it can
render while maintaining a solid framerate is impressive.
Media
The Xbox One wants to be the one system that handles all the
entertainment in your living room. Movies, music and, of course, games,
it's set up to do it all.
From streaming apps to cable
integration to Microsoft's own services, the Xbox One certainly seems
equipped to do it all. We're just glad Microsoft bit the bullet and put a
Blu-ray drive in its system. The Xbox One also plays CDs, something the
PlayStation 4 currently doesn't do. Still, can the Xbox One really handle the potentially backbreaking load of the living room?
OneGuide and HDMI-in
If you're in North America,
the Xbox One can integrate your cable or satellite feed thanks to an
HDMI-in port. It's not available in the UK yet but it's worth going into
because a future firmware update will unlock these features for Sky
subscribers.
After connecting your cable box to the Xbox
One via HDMI there's a setup wizard to take you through all the steps.
All you need to know is your service provider and post code. Punch that
in and the Xbox does the rest.
The result is the
OneGuide, live TV on your game console organized a lot like Sky or
Virgin's built-in menu. It can be navigated just like the One's general
interface, with speech, gestures, the controller or SmartGlass.
The
OneGuide menu is accurate, but not fast. Scrolling quickly often gives
you an empty menu that needs a few seconds before the listings pop in. W
Using
Kinect commands with the OneGuide can also be a headache. While it
easily understands page up or page down, telling it to go to specific
channels can be rather inaccurate. It often tripped over all the
different acronyms that make up station names, and sometimes struggled
with something as simple as Comedy Central.
Our favorite
part of the Xbox One's TV integration wasn't the OneGuide, is was being
able to pin specific channels and movies for fast access. We also liked
how TV listings were integrated in search results alongside streaming
services. For example, if you used Bing to search for a movie, the
results will include the next time it's showing on TV, as well as places
to buy or rent it.
The Xbox One is also hit or miss with
5.1 sound integration. There's some extra configuration you have to
work through, and while we were able to get it running, others have
reported that it degrades sound quality, or just doesn't work at all.
That part of the service is marked as in beta, so Microsoft is working
on it.
Lastly,
while that HDMI-in is meant for TV, you can use it for anything with an
HDMI port. Before you get too excited, we should tell you that it's
slightly too laggy for gaming. Forget about playing Killzone: Shadow
Fall or Super Mario 3D World via the Xbox One, it's a much better
experience plugged directly into your TV.
Streaming apps
When
consoles aren't playing games they're often streaming movies, either
through Netflix or YouTube. The likes of BBC iPlayer and 4OD are not
currently supported but they're on the way.
Xbox Music
Sony
has Music Unlimited, Xbox has Xbox Music, and both services are doing
their best to impersonate Spotify. Xbox Music has a library of
comparable size, just like Spotify it charges £10 a month for unlimited
streaming across your console, PC, phone and tablet.
When
we reviewed the PS4, we noted how poor the Channel (radio) service was
at finding music we liked. Xbox Music's Radio function is much better at
song matching, but its Sony's Music Unlimited that has the better
background interface.
To have music going while playing a
game, Xbox Music relies on app snapping. That's a pretty nonsensical
choice, since it forces you to give up precious screen space for an app
you only need to hear, not see. Why on earth doesn't it just run in the
background?
Other
than that it's a fine music service. While playing in full screen on
your TV it cycles through sharp looking album art and band photos. You
can listen to whole albums, or create a radio mix. If you're playing a
mix, you can zoom out and see the songs that are coming next.
Still,
the lack of proper background playback is a deal breaker. While it's a
fine way to just play music if your Xbox One is hooked into your stereo,
it's not a great way to hear tunes while playing some Killer Instinct,
which seems like the whole point of putting music and games on the same
system.
Hopefully Microsoft will patch in some background functionality. Until then you're better off with a separate music service.
Gallery
Engadget Microsoft Xbox One Reviews (Critic's Reviews 7.8/10, User Reviews 8.1/10)
PCMag Microsoft Xbox One Reviews (Editor's Rating 4.5/5)
Techradar Microsoft Xbox One Reviews (Design 4/5, Features 4/5, Usability 4/5, Performance 4/5, Value 4/5)
CNET Microsoft Xbox One Reviews (CNET Editor's Rating 3.5/5, Average User Rating 4/5)
The Good Microsoft's Xbox One
integrates live TV in an innovative fashion and can control your cable
or satellite cable box, TV, and receiver. Most games present noticeably
improved graphics over those on the Xbox 360. The One has a slightly
better roster of exclusive games compared with the PS4's. Titanfall
available with new Xbox Ones at no charge (as of March 11).
The Bad It
costs $100 more than the PS4, and the additional Xbox Live Gold
membership fee is required to use nearly every cool feature. The live TV
integration is fraught with frustrations: Kinect voice commands don't
always work, the new dashboard is more confusing than it needs to be,
and the system lacks full DVR integration. PS4 generally delivers
slightly better graphics and performance on cross-platform games so far.
The Bottom Line Its
high price and imperfect voice control and TV integration keep the Xbox
One short of must-have territory, but the inclusion of Titanfall for
free (for new purchases) helps Microsoft's console hold the line against
Sony's compelling PS4.
Where to Buy
$499.00 Amazon Xbox One Console - Titanfall Bundle*free shipping
$499.99 Dell XBOX One System
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