There was a fair bit of anticipation surrounding the new gen Xbox which was finally unveiled by Microsoft yesterday. Some of the pre-event chatter included guessing the name for the console, some thought it’ll be named 720 and few rumoured it to be infinity. But interestingly Microsoft went with “Xbox One”, apparently because the company says this console is everything packaged into one. A lot was expected out of the new Xbox, maybe because the current Xbox 360 was launched almost two thirds of a decade back and a lot has changed since then. Surprisingly or rather disappointingly Microsoft messed it up this time.
The event focused on the device being a centre piece of the living room and touting it as the start to a new generation of entertainment. Microsoft’s officials paid a little too much attention on the seamless integration of home entertainment with this gaming device and completely missed the area of gaming. Xbox is fundamentally a gaming console and gaming should have taken the centre stage but rather very little information on it was divulged which left many gamers confused and angry. A little cameo appearance was made by EA officials on the stage who restated the already known. Extremely disappointing!
As far as the hardware goes, under the hood there has been a huge upgrade in the specs, the new console has a 8 core CPU along with 8 GB RAM, it has been given a 500GB HDD and a Blue Ray drive, HDMI in/out and USB 3.0. Xbox One isn’t online-only, but developers can choose to release online-only games using Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service. The games have to be installed first that’ll connect to Live account, and a second account can only be added to it by paying a fee, so no used games, that’s a bummer! And Xbox One isn’t backwards compatible either so don’t think of disposing your 360 just yet.
The Kinect 2.0 has been massively improved, the new 1080P camera has an increased the depth of field, so now you won’t have to move you furniture around. It can now track the smallest of the movements and even sense the heart rate of the user. A lot of gesture controls were also demonstrated which brings us to its entertainment integration. Not only will you be able to operate your TV with Kinect 2.0 but check for TV guide, video chat on Skype, check fantasy league, see what’s trending which will be updated to the very minute, see what your friends’ prefer and all that on a split screen while watching a movie or playing a game thanks to its new Snap view. The brilliant voice and gesture controls will now make remote controls absolutely redundant.
But Microsoft somehow forgot to answer a few key questions including its price and a lot of it features. It’ll definitely have to come up with another event to give all the answers and hopefully that’ll not be as boring as this one. Already a huge chunk of the online gamers community has started ridiculing the new console, so Microsoft has a lot at its hands to fix before the December launch.
[Via – Wired]