What's in the Xbox?
What a pile. An Xbox One purchase
gets you the console and a Kinect, a power cable and adapter (aka the
power brick), a decent headset, the headset adapter, an
HDMI cable and
controller with batteries. You'll also get a 14-day free trial of Xbox
Live Gold.
The PlayStation 4 is a lot more tidy in this
respect. The Xbox One is down on power compared to the PS4 and it's much
bigger too - yet the PS4's power supply sits inside its frame, while
the Xbox One comes with a big external power brick.
Design
The first thing you'll notice about the
console when you get it out of the needlessly elaborate packaging is
what an absolute beast it is. 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 not exactly a looker, either.
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 a TV signal from a set-top
box. There's also a third USB 3.0 port found on the system's right side.
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. There's been quite a few firmware
updates since launch, too, so expect your first patch to take a while
depending on your internet speed.
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 unless your TV or projector screen is very large.
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.
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.
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,
for example, 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.
Price: Buy Microsoft Xbox One at PC World for £349. It
launched with the new version of Kinect on board by default, though
Microsoft later announced changes that saw the Xbox One become available
without it - for a cheaper price - from June 2014 onwards.
The
normal Xbox One console can be found for £379 online, while the version
without Kinect costs somewhere around the £350 mark - about the same as
the PlayStation 4 which also comes without its Camera accessory by
default.
The End