As promised, Microsoft unveiled its next-gen Xbox 360 successor in today’s press event.
Duped "Xbox One", Microsoft’s upcoming console aims to be the single device that provides "all your entertainment." As such, Xbox One is designed to be permanently connected to your TV set, utilizing Kinect 2 to respond to your voice commands and gestures – including turning the console on.
When the console is on, you can simply utter the magic words "Watch TV" and the TV app will fire up instantaneously. And even when the console is not "turned on," Xbox One owners can take advantage of Kinect 2 through apps such as the TV listing app which allows them to switch channels by saying the desired channel’s name with no need to specify its number.
Xbox One also supports multi-tasking; so you can browse the internet or chat in Skype in a side panel while watching a movie.
But what about gaming?
According to Microsoft, Xbox One delivers 8 times the graphics performance of Xbox 360. The company didn't reveal any details about Xbox One’s CPU, except that it sports 5 billion transistors; that is, ten times the 500 million transistors found in Xbox 360’s CPU. Xbox One also boasts 8 GB RAM, 500 GB hard disk drive and a Blu-Ray drive.
Learning from past mistakes, Microsoft’s engineering team took care while designing Xbox One to prevent overheating. As a result, the team opted to have Xbox One’s CPU and GPU hosted on a single 40 nm chip that is connected directly to the consoles’ heat sink along with the memory, the controller logic, the DRAM, and the audio processors. The internal components of Xbox One are also custom-built to be smaller than off-the-shelf components in order to allow for better air flow. This includes the hard disk and optical drive.
Xbox One ships with Kinect 2 that is able to detect minor orientation changes in hands and fingers. As for the gamepad, it is slightly larger than that of Xbox 360 and it doesn't have a "share" button if you are wondering about that. Just like PlayStation 4, Xbox One comes with native game capturing and editing tools. Additionally, Microsoft said that it has upgraded Smartglass as well, but didn't elaborate on its new features.