"It's a Trojan horse!" they said. When Microsoft released the original Xbox in 2001, the company dominated the computing world, and common wisdom held that its console was going to use games as a gateway to conquering your living room. In the end, the Xbox was just a games machine. The Xbox 360 was also called a Trojan horse, and although it eventually proved to be a popular way to watch Netflix, it too was primarily just another games machine.
With the Xbox One, Microsoft isn't even bothering with the wooden-horse trick. The new console is a Trojan army, blatantly marching on your living room, carrying a banner that reads, "We are here for your TV!"
Made for a new era
When the Xbox 360 hit the market in 2005, we lived in a different world. Twitter didn't exist. Facebook was solely for college students. The iPhone was two years away. App stores? Xbox Live Arcade was one of the first, but the idea that you would download every app for your device from a unified online store is a relatively new thing, made commonplace by hundreds of millions of smartphone sales.
The Xbox One is, to its core, made to live in our new consumer-electronics era. It's an era in which we don't just watch TV, we tweet about it. We don't just play games, we share videos of our best moments. Nearly everything has an online component, and computers don't even have disc drives anymore. We live in an age in which talking to your phone's built-in assistant is so two years ago.
The Xbox One is made for an age in which we expect everything to be downloadable from a single online store. The Xbox One aims high. It promises to be your always-on living-room hub that plays nicely with your cable box, runs the latest and greatest games, streams, shares, and makes video calls. That it succeeds at all is somewhat amazing, though in some ways Microsoft has bitten off more than it can chew. The Xbox One is a truly next-generation device, enjoyable by a wide audience without alienating the core enthusiasts, but its software lacks polish and refinement.
TV is more than cable
Maybe you don't have a cable or satellite subscription. Maybe you're a cord-cutter, and you get everything from Netflix, Hulu Plus, or Amazon Instant Video. Those apps and more are nicely integrated into the Xbox One environment, though it leaves me wanting more.
"Xbox, Bing South Park" brings up a list of all content related to the TV show. (Yes, like an uncool parent desperately trying to relate to teenage kids, Microsoft insists that you use "Bing" as a verb instead of "Search," thus making both Bing and Xbox less cool.) Select an episode, and the Xbox One shows you all supported services where you can watch it.
The way the Xbox One shows you every option for watching streaming content is a godsend for cord-cutters. There's something almost magical about saying "Xbox, go to Netflix" and watching it flip right over without ever bringing up a menu or fiddling around with the remote. When you're done watching House of Cards, you can say "Xbox, play Forza Motorsport 5" and be right back in the middle of the track where you left off, with no loading screens, assuming that Forza Motorsport 5 was the last game you played.
Although show titles tend to trip up the voice recognition quite often, repeating yourself a few times still proves to be faster than typing in show names with a remote or gamepad.
The initial lineup of streaming services has some notable holes. HBO Go is "coming soon" but not yet available. YouTube is the biggest missing link, but streaming music services such as Pandora and Spotify would be most welcome, too.
The Xbox One gracefully serves as a target for DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) "play to" functions, streaming photos and playing music or video over your home network with ease. But here, too, Microsoft has work to do. The console is not a DLNA "pull" device—it can't search your network for DLNA servers and browse the content on them.
The games are definitely next-gen
Let's talk about the games—the real reason most consumers who have their eye on this console will part with $500 for it this holiday season. The Xbox One delivers a thoroughly next-gen experience. Forget all that fanboy nonsense of the past few months about native rendering resolution and such.
I've played half of Ryse: Son of Rome, and it is both more fun than expected and an arresting visual spectacle on a par with the best the PlayStation 4 has to offer. Forza Motorsport 5 is the sharp, clean, smooth racing sim a next-generation launch title should be. Dead Rising 3 is impressive in its scope, and I didn't notice any crippling slowdown when mowing down hundreds of zombies. It's miles beyond what any current-generation console could hope to pull off.
Play 'Ryse' for a few hours, and tell me it doesn't look every bit as good as any PS4 game. Full reviews of the Xbox One games will have to wait, particularly since it's so difficult to get a handle on multiplayer while using the prerelease Xbox Live environment. I think it's safe to say that anyone with reasonable expectations for next-generation console launch games will be quite happy with the Xbox One roster.
A note on game installs: Yes, every game needs to be installed to the hard drive. The speed at which this happens varies, and in the current preproduction environment, I don't think I'm seeing the same download speeds you'll experience on the real Xbox Live network after launch. Many games are "ready to play" while they're still downloading or installing off the disc, but the wait time to get to that point varies widely from one game to the next.
Game DVR is neat, and terribly flawed
Microsoft's "Game DVR" feature is fantastic. Just say "Xbox, record that" and it grabs the past 30 seconds of gameplay (which is really the past 5 minutes of gameplay automatically trimmed to 30 seconds, but you can extend it to 5 minutes easily).
The best part is the way this feature is integrated into games. The games I played would often surprise me by saying that a game clip had just been created, right after I did something cool. "Oh yeah," I'd think, "that would be a really cool clip!"
Game DVR recordings are chock-full of artifacts, making gorgeous games such as 'Forza Motorsport 5' look like garbage. The problem is, the quality is awful. The problem is not the resolution or frame rate of the recorded clips (720p, 30 frames per second). It's the bitrate and encoding parameters. The road in Forza Motorsport 5 turns into a blur of artifacts. Every ounce of detail from a Killer Instinct match disappears. I've been told that the bitrate is somewhere around 1.5 megabits per second, but the clip I saved to SkyDrive was about 30 megabytes for a 1-minute clip, or about 4 megabits per second. Microsoft desperately needs to change the encoding settings for this feature—it's making the games look like garbage.
A world-class controller
The new controller—which takes the well-loved design of the Xbox 360 controller and refines it further—is terrific. It's a little smaller, with more-precise and more-responsive sticks, a vastly improved D-pad, and buttons that are a little closer together and easier to press. The triggers have their own rumble motors, which is really effective in some games and gimmicky in others.
IMAGE: MICHAEL HOMNICKThe new controller is really, really good. The headset is an improvement, too. Unfortunately, there's no obvious way to learn how much charge your controller has left. That seems like it would be good information to have. The good news is, I played all weekend—easily 20 hours—on the included pair of AA batteries.
The new headset is better, too. It's more comfortable and adjustable, with better sound quality. It clips to the bottom of the controller via a proprietary plug, and although the connection seems annoyingly large at first blush, it's a godsend. The plug has large, unambiguous mute and volume buttons that you can't miss in the middle of a heated gaming match, yet it stays entirely out of the way of your grip.
That HDMI input
I tried plugging the HDMI-output cable of my DirecTV box into the Xbox One's input, and then setting it up as my cable provider in the settings screen. I also have an Onkyo receiver between the Xbox One and my TV.
IMAGE: Michael HomnickThat extra HDMI port, the one labeled 'HDMI IN,' makes all the difference I can walk into the room and say "Xbox, on," and the Xbox One will wake from its low-power slumber, turn on my TV, and turn on my receiver. It will automatically recognize me and log me in. If my fiancée walks into the room, it automatically recognizes her and logs her in, too.
I can say "Xbox, watch TV" and it kicks over from whatever I'm doing to show the output of my DirecTV box (or whatever else is plugged into the HDMI input). The voice-controlled "OneGuide" channel guide is nice, but I almost never look at my channel guide to see what's on. I do find some value in saying "Xbox, watch Comedy Central," causing the Kinect camera to work like an IR blaster and immediately flip my DirecTV box to channel 249, or saying "Xbox, watch HBO" to hop over to channel 501. It's faster and easier than using a remote.
But the Xbox One doesn't know what recorded programs are on your DVR, and can't program it. The console can't access all the on-demand menus and content. So you can't ditch your remote; you can only use it less often. For someone like me, who never watches live TV, the real benefit of this TV integration is quickly and easily switching from watching TV to doing something else (like viewing Netflix or gaming) without changing inputs and turning on other devices. It's a real timesaver.
I also ran the PlayStation 4 into the HDMI input, and it works just fine. I didn't play much, but passing the PlayStation 4's video signal through the Xbox One didn't produce any extra latency.
You can run a PS4 into the HDMI input of the Xbox One, if you want. It doesn't do anything special, though. Kinect is a vast improvement
The new Kinect is leagues beyond the Xbox 360's Kinect. It's smaller, it works far better in dim light, and it has a much easier time tracking a tall guy like me in a tiny San Francisco living room. For the most part, the camera is a great addition to the system, and it's probably a good gamble on Microsoft's part to force the Kinect on everyone, even if that decision makes the Xbox One cost $100 more than its primary competitor.
But the device still needs refinement. What's that saying again? Eighty percent of the time, it works every time.
Image: Michael HomnickThe new Kinect is a vast improvement over the old one. Once you learn the proper commands (I keep wanting to say "log in" instead of "sign in"), voice control works great. Except when it doesn't. The console correctly understood me eight or nine times out of ten, but the small percentage of the time you have to repeat yourself is still frustrating. Pressing a button works 100 percent of the time—that's the standard that other interface methods must live up to.
What's that saying again? Eighty percent of the time, it works every time.
Many of the voice commands are faster than buttons and menus are, even if you end up repeating yourself. On balance, the Kinect stuff is very cool and honestly quite useful, but I imagine that most users will use only part of what's there.
I should mention that you can also navigate the Xbox interface by holding up your hands and grabbing, pulling, pushing, and sliding things around, Minority Report–style. This approach is slow and annoying. On rare occasions, the Xbox One thought I was trying to control it with hand-waving gestures when I was just taking a sip of my drink during dinner. It popped up controls and a ghostly hand on the screen, interrupting the TV show. It should have an option to turn all this hand-waving-navigation stuff off, but it doesn't appear to include one.
A dearth of detail
The settings are fairly basic. You have no way to see exactly how much storage all your games and saves and downloadable content are using up. You can press the menu button in your list of games and apps to get the installed size of a single game (and an option to uninstall it), but that doesn't tell you how much space you have left on the 500GB hard drive.
There's just no way to see at a glance which games take up the most space so you can know what's best to delete when you need to make room for something new.
This is the only indication you get of how much space your games are taking up. You also can't see, for example, your download rate or time remaining. Notifications tell you when apps were updated, but not necessarily what those updates contain, and notifications don't appear when a system update has taken place.
I imagine that customer demand will force Microsoft to add such features to the Xbox One in the first round of patches.
Social sharing…or lack thereof
Regrettably, the Xbox One doesn't let you share your game videos very easily. You can't stream live to Twitch or Ustream. You have no way to post anything you do to Facebook or Twitter. In fact, in a day and age where TV shows and commercials display hashtags, the complete lack of social integration on Xbox One is conspicuous.
You can save your game clips from Upload Studio (the free app that edits clips you save in Game DVR) to SkyDrive and then do whatever you want with them, from your computer or smartphone. That's a welcome feature, but a lame cop-out considering the absence of any social integration at the system level.
Microsoft's only kinda-sorta attempt at letting you share stuff is mediocre SkyDrive integration. Also, you get no systemwide feature to take high-quality screenshots, which seems like a huge oversight. In this regard, a voice command may be too slow…might I suggest tapping the Menu and View buttons simultaneously?
Quiet, power-efficient, always connected
Microsoft really doesn't want you to turn your Xbox One all the way off. For starters, the console takes an eternity to power on when you do (about 40 seconds or so). From standby mode, the Xbox One is live in less than 15 seconds. My receiver and TV take about that long to turn on, but it's still a little disappointing that the console doesn't wake up more quickly. In the standby state, the Xbox One will download game and system updates and the like, and is virtually silent.
IMAGE: Michael HomnickSlightly warm air and a gentle hum are all that ever escape the huge vents on the top of the Xbox One. But here's the neat bit: The most recent game you've been playing stays held in a suspended state, even in this standby mode. That's right—you can say "Xbox, turn off" in the middle of a Ryse level, go to bed, wake up the next day, say "Xbox, on," and select Ryse, and you're exactly where you left off within seconds. No loading screens. More than all the fancy high-definition graphics in the world, features such as this make the system feel "next-generation."
No matter what you do with it, the Xbox One is whisper quiet; it's certainly much quieter than the PlayStation 4 or any current-generation system. Sitting idle in its menus, the Xbox One draws about 70 watts of power and hums along at just over 40dB. Its low-power standby mode is too quiet to measure reliably, and draws about 18 watts. Playing an intense game such as Ryse, the power draw jumps to about 125 watts, but the noise stays down to around 45dB. Most of the time my DirecTV box made more noise than the Xbox One did.
Xbox Live Gold subscription required
An Xbox Live Gold subscription is not required to use the Xbox One, but it is required to enjoy the Xbox One. The service costs about $60 a year, and without it you can't do anything good with this console. The Gold tier of Xbox Live has always been necessary to play games online. Users have also always needed Gold membership to access Netflix, Hulu Plus, and other streaming media services (even though you're already paying for those separately, and nobody else locks them behind a paywall).
Slay hordes of zombies while you catch up on 'Family Guy'? Not without Xbox Live Gold you don't! In a console so focused on seamlessly blending TV, online streaming services, and games, it's a shame that this extremely anticonsumer policy has been extended into this new generation, and in fact, extended further. With the Xbox One, not only are the streaming media apps, and Skype, and freakin' Internet Explorer, for Pete's sake, locked behind the Gold paywall, but so are great new features such as Game DVR, the unified OneGuide TV listings, and even SkyDrive.
The good news is, you need only one Gold account for everyone who uses your Xbox One. Set it as your Home Console, and everyone who uses it, whether they have their own Xbox profile or sign in as a guest, will share your Gold privelages.
Bottom line
On balance, the Xbox One is a fantastic piece of technology, well worth the cost of a new iPad. There are some sore spots, which Microsoft will undoubtedly address in the coming months through software updates. Chief among them are the terrible quality of Game DVR recordings, the inability to stream game sessions, and the total lack of social media integration. People want to share their fun with the world, and "upload to SkyDrive and do what you want from there" is a half-baked solution. The ridiculous policy of requiring Xbox Live Gold to use streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu Plus deserves to be abolished, too.
But this is Xbox One version 1.0. This is like the "Blades" interface of the Xbox 360. If this is the starting line, it's pretty exciting to think about where the console will be in another year or two.
Even so, we're looking at more than just a solid foundation. The launch lineup doesn't boast a "gotta have it" system-seller—Titanfall may be the first when it arrives this spring—but it still has quite a few very good games. These games are worth your time and money, and they clearly demonstrate the power and features of the system. Buying an Xbox One is not just buying into a promise of great things; there's a whole lot of value in this $500 box right now.
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