I was surprised to find the Xbox One to be smaller than I thought it would be. Everyone online says it's huge...I just don't think that's true. It's about the same size as the Original Xbox 360, but way lighter. I think it looks really classy in my entertainment console, and so does my wife. The white original 360 was an eyesore, the Xbox One looks great.
The device is completely silent so far. I haven't heard a thing out of it. Inserting a movie into the slot take like no effort at all. I barely placed it in there and the slot started sucking the disc right in with no push effort of mine necessary. Setup is fairly easy, although this day and age, you have to connect quite a bit to the box, ethernet, HDMI, SPDIF/ Optical Audio, Kinect Sensor, Power Brick.
The power brick is about the same size as the original 360 power brick, but not quite as long as a rectangle as the original power brick. I just placed it behind our TV console where it can't be seen and am totally fine with it.
Voice controls are love and hate. It is really cool to be able to say "Xbox On" or "Xbox Turn Off" and have my TV, Amplifier, and Console all power up or shut down. Yes that's right, the Xbox can control your TV and your Audio amplifier. Really cool!
I wish that I didn't have to speak so loudly to get voice recognition to work reliably. The way it works is, you say "Xbox" and then a voice menu pops up giving you generic options of what to say. But it takes some getting used to. You could just say "Xbox...whatever voice command" and that way you don't have to deal with the menu or anything. I was annoyed that "Xbox" didn't just bring up the listening mode....to just bring up a listening state you actually have to say "Xbox Select" and then it will turn all of the voiceable commands green on the screen. Like text you can say will turn green letting you know that you can control that with voice. But if you were to just say "Xbox", then a menu would pop up with generic voice command options but not let you actually control the window you were on.
This will all make sense when you play with your Xbox One, but just remember, to make voice commands on your current window, say "Xbox Select" and not simply "Xbox". Trust me :)
The voice commands even worked for my wife who has a prominent Spanish accent (from Spain). She was dissapointed that when she tried "Xbox show Grey's Anatomy" or "Xbox Play Grey's Anatomy" that Xbox didn't really know what to do with it.
I still have to figure out how the voice controls work with Hulu, Netflix and Amazon Instant. I'm not totally sold on the voice control just yet. It's really useful in some situations and not in others. So I need to figure out the balance of when to use voice and when to not. It is pretty awesome if you get a phone call to be able to say "Xbox Mute" or "Xbox Stop" or "XBox Pause"
I think the YouTube app is fantastic. Which is really important for me. I have like 70 YouTube subscriptions and I go through them daily for content. There is a lot of good stuff on YouTube these days. I also have the Google Chromecast device, and the Xbox One has immediately replaced that device. The Chromecast is cheap and simple, but I realized how much I missed just being able to browse content on my TV screen. Now browsing on the TV screen just didn't work all that great previously, but the Xbox One is fast, and I use my phone or tablet with the Smart Glass app to be able to type.
Smart Glass is drastically improved. The app is just more responsive and seems to work really well now. When your Smartglass app is connected, and you encounter somewhere on the Xbox One where you have to put in Text input, the Smart Glass app on your phone will actually vibrate your phone as if to remind you that you can type on the phone instead of onscreen. It's really cool and well thought out. Otherwise you have to do the hunt and peck text selection using your controller which just takes forever. I haven't tried out the other uses of Smart Glass yet as in with games.
I haven't bought any games yet, but I downloaded Killer Instinct and the demo of Kinect Rivals. The Kinect Rivals demo is just one level of the Jet Ski racing portion of the game. You control entirely with your body movements. It was actually really fun and can be played with two people. I think Kinect Rivals will be one of the games that I can get my completely non-gaming wife to play with me.
Killer Instinct looks great. Both Kinect Rivals and Killer Instinct graphics are impressive, but nothing mind blowing here. Killer Instinct is free to download and you get to play as only one character "Jago". You can pay for additional characters and there will be more characters playable in the future as they slowly release the new ones.
It takes a while to get everything up and going. Online didn't require a setup (ethernet connection), the Xbox just worked online and never asked me for any setup for internet. I had to immediately download 512 mb download which went really fast on my internet connection. No complaints there. There a few tutorials all over the homescreen you should check out when first using the box, especially the voice control ones are really helpful. Also you need to go into settings to setup the Xbox to know what TV and Audio amplifier you have for it to be able to control both.
I also took sometime to download the Blu-Ray player app (yes it's an app download), Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Video, YouTube, Xbox Video, and all that jazz. I was very happy that none of those apps asked me for login info at all! The Xbox One already knew that I had these services setup already on my 360 and they all just worked with no configuration necessary! Very cool.
Also the Netflix app on the Xbox One supports the multiple user profiles! Excellent. You can switch profiles from the app.
I was very shocked by the Browser. Overall it's excellent. I was able to play YouTube videos through the browser. The Browser even has Incognito Mode...and it appears that you can play videos from most sights...wink wink. And the browser has an option to display mobile version of sights which is helpful because almost certainly if you have a problem with a site running, the mobile version will most certainly work. This is a great option for some video sites. You can set bookmarks, and can even set a pin to your home screen of web links.
You can customize the pins on your homescreen however you like. Another great use of Kinect is that it recognizes my wife and me automatically. If she says "Xbox Show my stuff" it switches profiles and shows her homescreen. We have seperate skype accounts on each profile and that works. When she logs into skype you can hear it disconnecting my skype and connecting hers. The Skype feature is HUGE in our home because my wife talks to her family in Spain on a daily basis via Skype. She loves this feature!
I am a hardcore game and I love what the XBox has for gaming, and more importantly, what is to come. But in our house, my wife will use the XBox One to watch her shows on Hulu and Netflix, and use Skype almost everyday. I also watch a lot of TV on Hulu and Netflix and so in our home, easily this console will be used for more Multimedia stuff than gaming. That being said, I will do a lot of gaming as well.
I think Microsoft has the right vision for the living room. I'm glad I got the box. I will also buy a PS4 next Christmas, but we are very happy with the Xbox One.
The voice stuff needs to be figured out. There's just a general learning curve to the whole thing, but be patient. Give it sometime. Once you get over it all you can go back to enjoying content and games rather playing with the new UI.
I think the Xbox One has a lot of potential and we are very happy with it so far.
I caution anyone though that this is a really complex box. A lot you can do with it. I don't think even professional reviewers can do this thing justice in a few days of use. You really need to spend some time with it to get a full grasp of all that it can potentially do.
Now onto the games!
Cheers
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Top reviews from other countries
Amazon Customer
Better than expected, but be warned some features are not available
Reviewed in Canada on November 22, 2013Chaoz
Unsafe packaging. Defective Kinect sensor.
Reviewed in Canada on November 24, 2013A Logical Canadian Gamer
A worthy successor to the 360
Reviewed in Canada on March 4, 2014
Dennis Madison
Absolutely Amazing! Perfect for Gamers and non-Gamers.
Reviewed in Canada on December 11, 2013H377
Late delivery, and the power supply failed not a month later
Reviewed in Canada on January 23, 2014