Gadgetory

hey everyone I'm Jeff Bakalar for cnet.com and today I'm taking a look at the Xbox one it's a little bigger than the PlayStation 4 and it's not as pretty looking but nevertheless it only comes in one version like the ps4 and that's the 500 gigabyte model for $500 which is $100 more than the PlayStation 4 so what are you getting for that extra money well you get the new version of Kinect which allows you to control your Xbox with your voice and motion gestures you can use your Kinect to control your cable or satellite TV box and because it has an HDMI in and out it can pass through your TV signal and let you watch TV and play games at the same time ok so how does all of that work well not really perfectly at all first connect can't do much with using your DVR so if you record a lot of shows on the fly you'll need to keep your original remote handy sometimes Kinect won't even hear you and other times it has no idea what you're saying alright so here is the Xbox one in our living room demo environment I just want to show you how sometimes Kinect won't work when it's trying to change your TV channels Xbox watch HGTV and it's throwing on HDNet now when it works it's pretty cool it's nice but it's just not that reliable you'll probably wind up using your cable or satellite box remote more often than not ok so the games Xbox one games look great and they look a lot like PlayStation 4 games there's an 8 core CPU and a custom graphics chip inside as well and it's got a gigabytes of ddr3 ram alright now here is the Xbox one controller it's not as big of a change compared to what Sony did with the DualShock 4 and it's not actually as comfortable as it was to grip the original Xbox 360 controller now the start and back buttons are now called the view and menu buttons and they also move the Guide button up to the top and that's now called the home button up front there's actually IR ports that communicate with connect and can actually log you in using your face and which control your hold it now the best probable improvement of the new Xbox controller is the d-pad the d-pad is kind of awesome now it doesn't sit on that disc and you know it isn't really prone to all those accidental inputs that the original Xbox 360 suffer from the Xbox one menu system isn't as simple as it might appear on the surface there's too many confusing sections and a lot of times you don't really know where you've ended up within the menu system the best way I can describe it is kind of like menu inception because you'll start somewhere and then you're not sure how you got there and then when you back out to the home screen you don't know how to get back it'll all take a lot of time for you to get used to unfortunately more so than any video game operating system I've ever come across now the social and sharing elements on the Xbox one are not as fleshed out as they are on the ps4 right now you can only record video and upload the video using a built in app called the upload app it's also kind of disappointing that Xbox Live Gold is still required to do even the most basic features on Xbox one the same features that are free to do on a Playstation 4 now get this you still need Xbox Live Gold to do things like stream Netflix use some of the game DVR features and even use Skype so here you are paying $100 more than a ps4 and you pretty much have to be a gold member to enjoy a lot of the luxuries now make sure you check out our entire review to see which console is right for you I'm going to be updating it as a lot of new features go live there's a lot more plan for both of these systems now just like the ps4 it's probably wise to wait to purchase an Xbox one until there are more compelling games and software to make it worth your while that's going to do it for me this has been the Xbox one prasena comm I'm Jeff Bakalar you