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The Xbox One, Microsoft's next-generation gaming console, combines gaming and entertainment in one package. Its x86 architecture runs three distinct operating systems to multitask efficiently. The console will be out on Nov. 22 in 13 countries for $499.
The Xbox One connects via HDMI to your TV, and can also accept an HDMI feed from a cable box. The other ports you see on the back are optical-in, ethernet, two USB ports and the Kinect's proprietary jack
The ridged side gives way to an additional USB port, which is much easier to access from the front.
The controller is a sleeker version of the Xbox 360 controller, with only slight changes made to some buttons. For instance, the directional pad is more defined, and the triggers offer haptic feedback.
The Xbox One chat headset is packaged with every console, and plugs into the top of the Xbox One controller. The volume and microphone controls are found near the jack.
The new and improved Kinect looks similar to the previous model, but now supports 1080p output with a wider-angle lens.
In the tech world, eight years is eons. In eight years, we've seen the rise of the iPhone and Google's Android OS, the creation of Twitter, and gaming's tremendous growth on Facebook and mobile. Eight years is how long Microsoft sailed on the success of its Xbox 360 console, and only now has a successor risen.
After the huge appeal of the Xbox 360, the Xbox One stands a chance at being just as widely accepted, thanks to the company's vision of an entertainment-unified living room. Microsoft's next-generation console, out Nov. 22 in 13 regions, pushes the envelope to offer an entertainment and gaming experience suited to all types.

The first thing you'll notice about the Xbox One is how big it is. Pulling the massive rectangle from its box gives you a reliable feel for how beastly this console is. It may only weigh a pound more than the PlayStation 4 (7 pounds to the PS4's 6.1), but it certainly fills up an entertainment center with its large, blocky frame.
The half-matte/half-glossy design looks both out of the past and the future. It's hard to decide if the console is retro, or so retro that it's future-cool.
See also: Xbox One vs. PlayStation 4: Which Are You More Excited About?
The large size means for one huge improvement from the Xbox 360, though: the Xbox One is almost silent. If it weren't for the glowing X on its case, it would be easy forget the machine is even on. This almost allows you to forgive the giant, unsightly power brick that comes with the One, something it was nice to see Sony get rid of.
The front of the console is very minimal, with elusive power and eject buttons. While all the Xbox One's ports are hidden in the rear, there's an easy-access USB port on the side, for headphones or a wired controller.

How do you improve on something that's nearly perfect? That was the challenge when updating the Xbox 360 controller model, which is widely revered as the best in gaming. The Xbox One controller's small changes go the extra mile to deliver a more comfortable experience.
The controller is smoother to the touch, with a more aerodynamic back, thanks to the removal of the obtrusive battery pack from the Xbox 360 model. The thumbsticks have an improved grip, and all the other buttons are glossy without being slick.
The new directional pad is articulate without being mushy, and the triggers give the perfect amount of resistance. The controller now has buzzing haptic feedback in the triggers and bumpers, and it provides a subtle experience that makes gameplay a little more interesting.
The only feature that wasn't to my liking were the new buttons "Menu" and "View," which function as "Start" and "Select" once did. They are small and recessed, and are almost easy to miss in the heat of a game.
The Xbox interface has evolved a lot over the years; the old console's layout may be completely unfamiliar to current players. What we see on the One shouldn't surprise current Xbox 360 owners, but it has been cleaned up significantly.
The Xbox One Dashboard only has three visible sections, as opposed to never-ending tabs of options. The center shows recently used apps, games and menus, along with constants like the Gamer Profile and a My Games and Apps menu. Navigating to the right reveals the store, neatly divided into Games, Movies, TV and Apps.
The third section, just to the left of the main menu, is the most useful. In pins, players can stick up to 25 of almost anything on the console. You can pin apps and games, but you can also pin shows from inside Hulu or FoxNow, or albums from streaming service Xbox Music, or a webpage from Internet Explorer. This solves the console's biggest pain point: Having to dive through several menu layers just to find what you were looking for. These pins, along with the look of your dashboard, can travel with you to friends' consoles, or will appear perfectly mirrored in the Xbox SmartGlass mobile app.
If you don't like Windows 8's flat design aesthetic, you won't be a fan of the Xbox One. But the overall look of the menus is clean, crisp and pleasing to the eye. The bold icons for each section pop against the bright color palette of the Xbox menus.
Digging deep into the console's settings wasn't a chore, and no option for the Xbox was that difficult to understand. Everything had a neat, logical place that made troubleshooting any problems transparent.
One glaring menu problem was the painstaking download management process. Downloads live in your My Games and Apps menu; games just appear in the menu as they are queued for download. The Xbox One has no way to prioritize downloads automatically, so load your small stuff first, or use the Menu button to force a download to the top of the queue. If you're trying to grab two big games at once, you have to wait for one to finish before another can even start downloading, a huge hurdle when you're dealing with big files.
There have been plenty of demonstrations on how well the Xbox One can switch between tasks, but actually witnessing it is another story. The machine's three operating systems mean you can let your easily distracted brain run amok, as most apps take no time to load. While the situations Microsoft presented in its canned video demo are a little far-fetched, it's nice to see a console that can do a lot, and do it well. The Xbox One succeeds at keeping several balls in the air, but also saving your progress when you quickly depart an activity. Games resumed right where I left them even after spending an hour fiddling with other programs.
The console also uses snap, which puts a second app in a column on the right side of the screen. Microsoft said almost any app can be snapped, which could lead to plenty of creative applications. I was able to use Skype in my snapped view to keep track of a conversation while playing a game, and live TV in the corner while browsing around the store.
The only time the console is sluggish to load is for games, which are arguably a much bigger resource draw. Games are bigger than ever, and hard drives on consoles haven't sped up to help them load faster, not with SSDs still being too expensive. I saw some manifestations of the two operating systems at play when I received achievements in Ryse: Son of Rome, which would momentarily cause the game to stutter during action. Not a great sign.

Get ready to spend a lot of time talking to your Xbox One. The Kinect camera, which monitors players with two lenses and an array of microphones, has gotten a lot better since it was released in 2010. It's now integral to the Xbox One functionality, which is why Microsoft bundled one with every console.
The voice commands are much more sophisticated than previous versions, and you can now pretty much get to any service connected to the console via voice. It almost feels like the uncluttered Xbox One dashboard relies on Kinect to get to deeper functionality more quickly. You'll be able to launch games, snap any app, drill down to TV channels, answer Skype calls and control video with your voice, and that's not even everything.
There's something we have to get over about talking to our electronics, especially in the authoritative cadence the Xbox One demands. You don't necessarily even have to shout at Kinect, as it will pick up words at normal volume — which I learned by saying its trigger word "Xbox" in casual conversation. But you will have to repeat yourself sometimes, especially if there's suddenly a lot of background noise.
The camera is also leaps and bounds better than what we saw on the Xbox One. The 1080p improvements are obvious from the moment you turn it on, and the wider-angle lens is a boon to those who have to operate a Kinect in a smaller-than-optimal space, which was previously impossible. The improvement in quality enhances a variety of services now available on the Xbox One.
The camera is so good that Microsoft has used it to solve a major headache in the gaming world: the process of redemption codes. Now just flashing a printed QR code in front of the Kinect camera will allow it to identify and redeem your code in about three seconds. I was even able to redeem a code from my phone's screen by turning the brightness down.
Skype on the console is a huge improvement. While the service is in addition to in-game chat with Xbox Live users, the voice quality over the Kinect is crystal clear. But the Kinect acts as your own personal cameraman during a call, as it can digitally pan, zoom, and follow your body. When someone else joined me on the couch during a call, it panned to include us both in the shot automatically. It does its best to follow your face no matter what you do, and it does a decent job of it. The only issue that came up was that the Kinect panned out for no reason during a call, trying to catch something invisible to the rest of us.
The Kinect also knows who you are most of the time. You can assign your face to your Gamertag, and the Kinect will sign additional accounts in if it recognizes that face. The Kinect didn't have 100% accuracy in this, as it sometimes mistook people for others. It's most impressive trick was recognizing my boyfriend was in front of the camera, then letting him answer a group call with his Skype account instead of mine, even though I was the last one using the Xbox One.
The only game-like experience that features the Kinect available at launch is Xbox Fitness, a built-in app with a variety of full workouts from well-known trainers. It measures your posture, balance and heart rate all through the Kinect, and it's an impressive use of the technology. Kinect games in the past, with a few notable exceptions, were underformed ideas that didn't play well, but it looks like we can expect more accurate, innovative games from this technology.
The Xbox One is equipped to download all the usual-suspect entertainment apps: Netflix, Hulu, HBO Go, ESPN, and about 10 others will be available at launch. These all integrate well with the Xbox One and respond to the controller and voice commands with the responsiveness of a native application.
The biggest upgrade to the Xbox One's entertainment experience over Xbox 360 is its ability to interface with your cable box, though it may not be for every user. The Xbox One has an HDMI in port on the rear, and can receive information from most mainstream set-top boxes. To set this up, you'll give the Xbox One the model of your television, your cable provider, your zip code, and the maker of the set-top box. Most of this is easy to input, and works well with a few clicks. We did have to do some extra fiddling to make the One work with a Samsung set-top box, but that only really required entering the model number found on the rear.
Once you're up and running, the Xbox One will then take over your cable box's guide system with its own OneGuide. This has everything you'd expect from a cable guide, but with Xbox One's clean, flat interface, it's easy to mark channels to your favorites as you browse, giving them their own obvious section in the guide, a huge win for most of us who only browse 6-10 channels. You can also call out channels with the Kinect when watching TV, and it will direct you there, so you'll never need to remember channel numbers again.
But there are a couple downsides to having the Xbox One manage your cable, as your console must always be on to watch TV. The Xbox One's Kinect uses an infrared blaster to interact with the cable box, instead of any kind of internal compromise between the two systems. If you want to do anything besides change the channel or turn up the sound, you'll have to revert to the cluster of other remotes on your couch. There also isn't any way to manage your cable box's DVR via the One, or any on-demand entertainment provided by the cable or satellite company. With more consumers primarily viewing TV through DVR recordings on their own terms, ignoring that feature entirely because of technical limitations is very disappointing. It's a shame Microsoft can't completely shake cable companies the vice grip on live entertainment, because the OneGuide looks promising if it could fully spread its wings.
You can still access on-demand video apps through "App Channels" in the OneGuide, where you can view popular Hulu Plus selections, and your SkyDrive photos and videos in the TV guide. This wasn't a fully built out feature at launch, but presenting the media options next to each other in a curated fashion has game-changing potential for those plugged into several services.
Bridging onto this idea is Xbox One's powerful media search, powered by Bing. The easiest way to use this is through Kinect, which didn't have too much trouble figuring out what movie titles I was shouting at it. Once you've requested a movie or show, the Xbox One will show you all the apps where it's available to stream, buy or rent. This isn't a new feature from the Xbox 360, but it's a welcome integration with so many media options available to viewers.
With such a big marketing push towards the console's entertainment features, it may seem like gaming has taken a backseat on the One. This wasn't the case at launch, with Microsoft and third-party publishers releasing a scad of games at launch and beyond.
Launch lineups are never a reliable indication of a console's gaming future, as launch games are rarely as well thought-out or polished as what you'll see on the console a year or two down the line. In this tradition, the Xbox One has some games that are decently enjoyable, and then a few wild misses. Keep in mind many of the Xbox One's exclusive titles aren't out yet, and some third-party games weren't available at time of writing.
When games on the Xbox One look beautiful, it's something to sing praises about. Cinematic cut scenes can look amazing, and general gameplay looks like what we only see on high-end PCs. The Xbox One's ability to handle a lot at once was clear when you see how many AI zombies it was able to process while playing Dead Rising 3.
But not all games look the part of "next-generation." Fighting game Killer Instinct, remade for the Xbox One, features graphics that only look passable for current generation consoles. The game also has excruciating load times; I had to wait almost 20 seconds for my character to appear on the character select screen. The on-rails dragon riding shooter Crimson Dragon featured glaring texture problems, with overexposed, blurry lakes of fire.
An important thing to know about Xbox One games is that the load times are still as long as what you'd see on the current generation, or even longer. The first time you load a disc, you'll spend a couple minutes waiting for the game to install enough to play. When you download a full-size title, expect a really long wait before play time. While gamers can begin play before the game finishes downloading, you'll still typically need at least 30% of the game before that's possible.

The Xbox One has big shoes to fill when it comes to the footprint left by the Xbox 360. Microsoft has made plenty of changes to the console to make it easier to use for even non-gamers, with a polished interface that never gets bogged down. Among the titles available at launch, there isn't a clear blockbuster, but with huge games like Titanfall and Destiny coming in March 2014, it won't be too long until that changes. The streaming services are just as good as they were on the Xbox 360, although the Live TV offering comes with a few caveats. The Kinect integration, however, really is a novel way to switch between apps. Overall, the Xbox One experience is polished and stimulating, and it sets the groundwork for great gaming in the years to come.
What's Good
Excellent user experience
Comfortable controller
Sophisticated voice control
The Bad
No clear standout launch title
Live TV requires compromises
Many unremarkable launch titles
Bottom Line Even though all the pieces haven't fallen into place at launch, the Xbox One is the console that will bridge the entertainment and gaming gap best this generation.
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