The Xbox One is Microsoft’s attempt at living room domination that seeks to merge gaming, set top box, live streaming and media centre all into one. It’s an ambitious goal that could see the Xbox One dominate our living rooms for years to come.
To put it bluntly, the Xbox One is a beast. It’s much larger and heavier than the Xbox 360 and bigger than the PlayStation 4. The square design reminds us of the original Xbox. It isn’t ugly by any means, but it’s no supermodel either.
The sleek black exterior is all modern though. It’s rich, dark and contains several different textures to please the eye. The only illumination is the Xbox logo on the front – otherwise it’s all dark.
With this eighth generation of the console there has been a shift from bespoke hardware to fairly generic. For the first time, the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 can be directly compared with each other and with a PC. The Xbox One uses an eight-core AMD Jaguar processor clocked at 1.7GHz with a Radeon 7000-series GPU and 8Gb of DDR3 RAM. In PC terms, that’s an Intel Bay Trail Atom processor and an HD 7790 GPU. That’s quite a lot of power on tap for a console.
You cannot mention the Xbox One without including Kinect in the discussion. This new version of Kinect has a wide angle 1080p camera, better accuracy, faster processing, can perform heart rate tracking, track up to six people at once, scan QR codes and features an always-on microphone for voice commands.
The Xbox One uses three operating systems. It has Xbox OS at its core, a cut-down version of Windows and a virtualised software layer to create a whole for all three. Add to that a range of apps such as SkyDrive, Skype, Xbox Video, Xbox Music and the like and you have a pretty feature-rich offering.
On paper, the Xbox One lags behind the PlayStation 4 in terms of hardware. However, it’s not about what’s under the hood that matters – it’s how much you can get out of what you have.
It remains to be seen how the game makers and app developers utilise this power and how much performance they can wring out of it. Whether it’s enough to take over the living room as Microsoft intends is going to be a battle fought in our homes for quite a while yet.
Jesmond Darmanin is a technology enthusiast who has his own blog at www.itnewsblog.com.