Xbox has always given serious completion to the Sony’s play station gaming consoles. Perhaps it is the only serious competitor since Nintendo focuses more on arcade games. Sony and Microsoft have always been head to head when it came to dominating the gaming consoles market. Xbox 360 brought a fresh new look and feel, it changed the way we experienced games and at times it even threatened Sony’s crown of the ultimate gaming consoles manufacturer.
This year Microsoft has come out with the latest edition in the Xbox line of gaming consoles. It is called the Xbox One. Microsoft considers it as a giant leap from its predecessor i.e. the Xbox 360. Considering its hardware it does looks as a giant leap indeed. We decided to devote some of our time in reviewing this beast of a gaming console.
Let’s see how well it did in our reviews.
Features:
Xbox has always tried to be a bit more than just a gaming console;
It focused equally on other aspects like entertainment and connectivity. However since Xbox 360 featured a DVD drive, it lost that race to play station 3 that featured a blu-ray disc drive which could be used for watching high definition movies on a blu-ray disc. But with Xbox one it feels like Microsoft has noticed their mistake as they have replaced the DVD drive with a blu ray drive, it only seemed natural since games are going to grow in terms of size and as a DVD is only 4.2GB at max, a blu-ray disc is the media for future games.
Looks wise it’s not that handsome, but there is not much to complain on it as Microsoft has focused more on the gaming prospects rather than the cosmetic outlook. It comes with a matt finish in a rectangular brick shape and is designed to blend in with other digital accessories that you might have.
Coming on to its hardware specification, it has an AMD processor with 8 cores, this is very similar to what ps4 has at its heart. Just like ps4 the GPU is also from AMD itself, looks like AMD is fast catching up in the GPU market leaving Nvidia behind.
Memory is 8GB DDR3, out of this 8GB, 5 is available for game play while 3 is reserved for the system and applications (again Microsoft is trying to focus more on other aspects by reserving 3GB for apps). You get a 500 GB internal hard drive; the bad part about this is that it is irreplaceable. So in this department we have to give more marks to the Sony play station 4.
A disadvantage that Xbox one has is the set up time, when it is powered on for the first time, you will be required to do a software update and this update is pretty heavy, it is around 1gb to be exact. If you don’t have a fast internet connection then this could make you wait for a while before you can experience any real game play on box one.
Pros:
- A powerful gaming console.
- Unlike Xbox 360 this time Microsoft went with a blu ray drive instead of a DVD drive.
- Controllers are great.
- Kinect takes very little time to set up.
- Blends in easily with other digital accessories in your living room.
- Support for popular apps like Skype and Netflix.
Cons:
- Really expensive.
- No functionality available unless you connect to the internet and update it.
- In order to use Netflix, live subscription is a must.
- Internal hard drive is irreplaceable.
Verdict:
No doubt that Xbox one is a giant leap ahead than Xbox 360. Making the decision between the latest play station 4 and Xbox one is more of a personal one as both of these consoles are more or less at an equal footing. We think that whatever it lacks can be fixed with software updates, if Microsoft takes this in to account then Xbox one can be the preferred choice.
Rating: 9 out of 10
Featured images:
License: Creative Commons
This review is written by Mandy Heart. Mandy is a software developer and has reviewed many products meant for Xbox One.