Gadgetory

welcome to top shelf my name is David Pierce and this week we're talking about video games and TV and netflix and blu-ray players and weird interfaces and gestures like this and hdmi passthrough but first let's talk about the Xbox 2013 really is shaping up to be the year of the next-generation console even after Nintendo launched the Wii last fall we were still pretty much all waiting to see what Microsoft and Sony would do this year Sony didn't actually have that much to say when they announced the PlayStation 4 in March but this week at an event at its headquarters here in redmond washington Microsoft had a much bigger story to tell they announced new product it's called the Xbox one coming later this year there's kind of a lot going on with engadget terms eight years is basically an eternity but since its launched in 2005 Microsoft has done an impressive job keeping the xbox 360 up to date with new games new apps a completely overhauled user interface and more the 360 was originally a pure gaming machine but it became something more it's microsoft's Trojan horse into your living room the company's attempt to create the one set-top box to rule them all but eight years is still a long time and Microsoft needed more than just new software to compete in 2013 not to mention in 2021 from a hardware perspective there are three parts to the one there's the big blocky black console which looks like a VCR but comes with massively upgraded specs the one is an eight core AMD processor eight gigabytes of RAM that's 16 times as much as the 360 if you're counting plus a 500 gig hard drive and USB 3.0 it also has a blu-ray drive finally then there's the new Kinect a smaller also blocky rectangle that sits above or below your TV and watches your every move although now it tracks much more than your every move it can track your eyes your facial expression your muscles your fingers and toes and even your heart rate it can also do it in the dark and do it in high definition it collects a lot more data than the last version and does it much faster and much more accurately we were pretty blown away by it in the short time we have at the new device Microsoft didn't leave the controller out of the upgrade cycle either it has 40 improvements we're told and a few are obvious it's smaller with a better integrated battery and its analog sticks or a little more text but the most obvious thing is the new impulse triggers which is just a fancy name for making the controls triggers vibrate when you fire a gun in a game you'll feel the recoil when you read the engine you'll jitter along with the car it's cool from what we've seen but it's a little much sometimes and it's not exactly earth-shattering anyway all that new hardware is used to power and control a lot of new Xbox software there's a new UI based on Windows 8 plus an involved Xbox Live that gives you more ways to find games and ways to upload videos of you playing there's a new snap mode which lets you pin skype or other apps to the edge of the screen while you play a game and watch TV oh and there's skype for xbox now too but here's the thing about the xbox one it's really only partly a gaming machine it's mostly some crazy hybrid of a set-top box cable box and blu-ray player the one can connect to all your home theater devices and even control your cable through its interface you can say watch ESPN to switch right to the channel or ask what's on HBO to see the guide for the channel you're looking for we haven't seen much of the interface or spent much time with it and frankly we're worried about the whole HDMI pass-through set up that really doomed Google TV but hey anything's better than your cable box last and weirdly kind of least for now or the games Microsoft showed us a half dozen or so new games from FIFA and Madden to quantum break and call of duty ghosts the graphics look great but they still look like video games quantum break a mix of game and TV show might be the only really innovative one of the bunch there are many more games coming at e3 so hoping to see more then but for now it seems like gaming hasn't been upgraded quite as much as the rest of the xbox experience the Xbox one is coming out later this year and we're certainly going to hear more about it as time goes on like a price for instance but even now it's clear that Microsoft is making big changes and betting big on the Xbox taking over your living room can it we'll see so we don't fare amount about the xbox one now certainly more than we know about the PlayStation 4 but there's still a lot to come and kind of a lot we don't know and a lot of questions we have certainly a lot of questions that these two have ross miller new hotel hello I'm drunker welcome that's fine I I've been drunk since the microsoft event that's how I get through Microsoft it is that's like days and days well actually I've been drunk since the Sony event well you should for all day with it was it was a day so it was like what you got there like eight in the morning no we got there we got there at seven in the most well a full hour and then it was raining because it's seattle of course that was me and then we just stood outside near a tent for like three hours until they let us in and we SAT there for forever being like we were probably here yeah and I ready to the minivan just we could get there early like it's great but you did like it was like a Seattle soccer mom the whole time but we saw a lot yeah um but we we also kind of didn't see a lot including like a lot of the rumors we thought were gonna be there a lot of things that we thought Microsoft to talk about that they haven't talked about um but so so I've talked to you about this a little bit night but I want to know what you think just sort of broad strokes rock how are the pulse vibrating sensors on the controller that's what uh it's like I don't really know how to describe this tally really dirty when they put it that way the pulse vibrant I just love to phrase impulse triggers like I don't know they just sounds like I have a gun and I'm like trigger-happy like that's why shouldn't in so many vaporizes yeah exactly uh but no it's like you it's cool in the sense that like if you're playing like you're firing a gun like it just vibrates in the right trigger so you actually get like the recoil like you just pulled a trigger or like if you start up a car it'll actually feel like you just started up a car and it'll sort of vibrate but then the same time it's like I really control pad controller right we yeah well yeah you know as you do if you shut up exactly uh but so it's it also i was like holding it at one point and it was you could rev the car a little bit and I just kept driving the car and it was literally my whole arm was like I can't play anymore haha a single room thoroughly told you I pretty much and then it turned out the best part of this is the demos were running on a PC but they were using to xbox 360's to prop up the mind like a broken yeah like a broken port story house it was it was pretty fun I mean that's that is the history of Microsoft was always to like run on a PC the first xbox I believe the dev kits were like max you're there really yeah oh wow it was little because you see the first text box was like a pc the 360 was all Power PC which was max mm-hmm Wow yeah no I just got nerdy that's pretty well so I mean history less I mean that's basically what this is it's like it's a pc like I'm running it on a computer in a weird box of them not always a pc it is a very similar if not the same pc that the playstation 4 is using yeah like it's some kind of AMD system own ship and might be the Jaguar we know I believe it is yeah so there it is the same color should work before yeah good guess no you you go wherever you want raise your show just just take up so what I want is my big question is like you pull your trigger story rebek right now my engine is reven i'm like i'm shaking here as i go it's ridiculous um but the like the xbox 360 came out eight years ago right and now now we're here and like a lot changed but it kind of feels like a lot more is gonna change in the next eight years the question I wanted to ask was at a basic level if they're building with pc components can't they just release a more powerful xbox two years from now and be like we just put a faster AMD system in on xbox three sixty five or whatever like that's what PC manufacturers do yeah it's what phone manufactured asked you i mean like i don't know why Ben Sony could conceivably do it the same way I mean like they're using these commodity components the reason they couldn't do it with the old consoles was because they're developing their own chips their own like architectures well any that they could where they could they did it to some extent like they're good they released back 360s with more storage as time went on for instance just to light because they were like oh people download things now give him a bigger hard drive I think they added an hdmi port right all kinds of crazy s'right 360 i'm saying like they never really talked you could make it but they did fundamentally make it more powerful is if you never change the internals before but we also we saw a shift in the mindset because before the playstation 2 the playstation 1 these weren't just like consoles like there were platforms when the platform and the harder was one to one and it was until last year with the last and a race games like i was warning that they did yeah and last generation they're like you know what we can just take this idea of a platform we can expand it like we're not gonna change it every four years like they used to we're just going to connect and say wait brands for a while right this is new but like the Xbox itself has now just two brands a platform I don't see why they wouldn't know that's the weird thing to me is that it seems like the last and this is super you know generalizing but it seems like the last eight years were like software right it was like let's watch TV on the internet let's stream games it was all about like different ways of doing stuff now it feels like at least for right now we're in this crazy hardware place where it's like we have watches we have wearable technology we have all this something like but you that becomes a lot harder to just build on top of this sort of super computer that here's the other thing because you say it's a hardware time when it was a hardware time last time like we're talking years and years ago it was I need the fastest processor at the fastest car it starts anything with laptop some TV that's gone last time it was literally these are the first HD consoles right and in order to even like have this experience it wasn't the ps3 like the most powerful computer either by supercomputers of that right because just to produce games HD resolutions which I mean Sony until like two weeks ago they're like the ps3's 1080p because I thought they were so proud of it but yeah right just to do that you need to the hardware now it's like the hardware is commodity it's cheap and you can move on beyond it and because it's cheap and commodity and more general purpose than whatever is in the 360 the PowerPC or whatever is in the ps3 you can do all this other computer stuff with it and what I'm actually getting out of this is this is kind of Microsoft's new pc in the same way that the iPhone and the iPad were Apple's new pc like let's use kind of this commodity arm stuff that's out there let's take our existing operating system and scale it down to this new thing create this new closed environment it's window I mean they're running windows on the thing right and it's as close thing or the games are effectively like they have their own app store with that xbox one Xbox a lot of stuff you know it's like you have the disc you still have to pay in download whichever one I mean it's if you look at it as these are pcs and what they're really doing is they're changing the way a living room pc operates a sliding it instead of like watching and they celebrate thing then then there are there opportunities to do stuff in the future are wide open well so let's talk about that so there's we have presumably what six months before all of these things are going to be out of the market so what I guess what I want to know is like what are the next six months look like and then what are the next eight years before the xbox two comes out like where where do we let's go six months to real it's good trolls gonna be great yeah good undercover case too yeah so we're like where are we in the next six months like what what does Microsoft have left to show as games obviously is one of the big things i console games yeah but is that it like if they sort of played their hands show us I think they need to they showed us some games right and they were games or video crimes they need to show us developers doing stuff with all that connects functionality they need to show us developers doing stuff with whatever half-hearted TV things they need to show us that you need to show us the same thing that I you know that when when when Google puts out a new version of Android or Apple puts out new version of iOS we're like that's great here are some features right the developers have to come in and use the features and build applications that make them interested and Microsoft is in the same place but I think more so than sony is because sony came out of the gate game demo after game demo right put the hardware in second place and you don't even need to see it right here's a controller this is the thing that you're in an interface with and what here's what we've given developers look at all the games here's it's even harder cuz if you look like an apple think you can just phone iphone 5 you still have the legacy of absent that will always work right and when you see these new generations like the backwards compatibility is ultimately non-issue they don't care we can take a technical hurdle that's just not worth the time and so it's kind of reset like I don't have any loyalty to Microsoft now because none of my games are there i sold my 360 that's enough order sony like to be honest I'm almost I iona 360 but I like once a week wind up debating buying a ps3 because I have this giant stack of ps2 games I really want to play and you can't how to ps2 mmm that's good say but you can't buy a ps3 bio on my place 3 the day they announced they were killing backwards compatible and I would I run even I bought an old one nice and I not use it exclusively as a blu-ray player why why would they kill backwards compatibility this is sort of a tangent I'm on here but like that that pisses me off like I have all these great games that I've paid a ton of money for and I'm there's not a dungeon technical level on a perception because on technical level obviously it's just so hard you target sure i forget that i guess i really like they could do it I'm look I'm just over the math of it but it seems like it's not dealing don't know what's it like this is a tough thing to do but I perception of what let's be honest everyone's mad that it's not backwards compatible but ultimately people don't give a like I know yeah and the kibbe now because it feels like a big feo to the day it comes out right people will forget but like the first six months the ps3 you played you know PlayStation 2 games whatever you also had your ps2 next to you now true you've had that stack and you've not touched it my ps2 is so broken and I'm so upset by features like one of the best consoles ever in history absolutely no one's playing games with it now right and the online community that they were there they still sell it I think they still sell it I think they finally stopped selling it this but this is what I'm saying like once you're on the PC architecture and you're in the PC cycle maybe this question goes away forever right right maybe the next Xbox actually comes out next year Yeah right and it's 1.5 xbox to xbox one point five right and it's just a little bit faster and they are going to Like dot updates what's like an Xbox one not what you can do with one sea games or a pc game come out and run the best on one system and run a little bit crappier on your old system but still run right you can definitely do I mean these are this is a PC running Windows right like what yes ultimately there's no reason they can't be able to they won't be able to do something like that whether they will it's wide open right but and I think that is that that's like those are the questions for them to answer in the short term right is what what is the platform cycle for this thing yeah how is the TV integration going to work like will it change over time I mean that stuff to me is like they've given some hints of it but they haven't explained anything about how it's really going to work like like what is their strategy for mobile like it's not there yeah like they have it you know they'd have a phone platform they have a tablet Padre well so it's emily is connected to act it seems like smart glass is what they're trying to make that platform and it's like ah oh to be honest my only actual experience of smart glass is that every time I go to watch Game of Thrones on my 360 the screen before i can hit play tells me you should watch this a smart glass and like I don't want to do that then I move on but like that like sony has this big rich sort of you know platform agnostic play and Microsoft just seems to have ignored it and which is weird because they have all this stuff 20 thanks our class is like it's great but it's it doesn't hey I think like just a hurdles to using it are they vastly outweigh the benefits of having it right beyond like I'm going to type in a text field which is like great you know yeah but they haven't come up with some like the kinect they came up with all these compelling reasons that you'd want to use Kinect and a little bit later in the connects lifecycle everyone stopped using Kinect because those reasons we're novel but they weren't great right and so outside of like voice controls and just like yeah batting at the TV like I never do any of that stuff but I remember there was a football game you could like if you like bent down like this and then went like this it would like hike the ball but it would only do it like forty percent side and the rest of time just like yeah I think it was a wonder forces like you can look around a little bit garlic but what I also the nuke act like maybe that'll enable some of the stuff but they have that problem with smart class which is okay well you've kind of connected it to this phone right but you don't have a real quick xbox live on windows phone is a hilarious joke okay it doesn't exist like your avatar yeah it doesn't exist anywhere else those games don't talk to the games I almost called poppy see those games don't talk to the games in the console I think this is this is the short term like sony has made this play right right and it's sony has to do the opposite thing they it's funny that they've now positioned themselves so opposite to each other yeah sony has to tell us all about the platform and the TV stuff and all the stuff in the hardware Microsoft has done all that they have to tell us about how they're gonna take all this hardware that they've introduced and build software on top of it to connect all of it and then ultimately show us some games yeah well okay so let's look like let's look maybe not eight years cuz that's sort of ridiculous but like two years from now or like three years from now what like how does Microsoft win like what if you're if you're Steve Ballmer or Don Mattrick or whoever and you're the dude in charge like where are you going in the next two years both of you I'm curious I just talked to you talk i know i'm thinking like it's because they're saying like if Sony plays it smart Microsoft students Marta they had the same video options right and like these are third-party Services people aren't going from Microsoft movies or Sony's you know a lot gonna be netflix and hulu and HBO right yeah and thats everywhere and it's not it's not third-party trials as much anymore because it's the same architecture the ports are gonna be easy right so unfortunately the solution is gonna have to be like just like I think exclusives I think you're actually still going to win on games which is ironic because that's the thing you're not doing as much with us anymore because last generation is like well we have connect which is great and Sony's like I got a wand you can wave this and we can the games you may 41 didn't as I work for the other right now that's that's a non-issue and everyone's out some kind of motion or voice control whatever you call it so you kind of leveled the playing fields i'm not sure what it is okay i don't think it's a do you think it's connect I mean I feel like to me that's the thing that keeps jumping out at me is like they've made the connect so good and so almost like overly powerful at this point like it seemed none of the games they talked about the other day had anything to do with Kinect they're just like games you play with the controller right but like you know whatever five years from now is connect are we gonna have thrown the controller away like everything we do is connect even if you like stand there and go like this particular just nothing and connect just like nose and figures out what you're doing that can I hate that kind of stuff cuz like it's it's like the uncanny valley of input device it's like you can do this to steer but you're not holding anything but I can swing a sword for like I'm not kidding you this one is right through a steer a fake wield it was fifty dollars yeah like it's some kind of its strong wheel it's a very good wheel uh no i mean like i think the kinect stuff is that's microsoft's long-term and if you talk to them like anyone at microsoft and you get them talking a natural user interface and this is like from their executives to like random when i talk to their PR people or when i talked like their lawyers we love naturally interface the lawyers just want to patent oh but there are the phrase natural user yeah nearly me on a lobby you can't get enough of it uh I just gotten used to GUI and now a new way man it's all good stuff um yeah that's where they're going and I think their vision of you walk in your living room and it's like space aging you like talk the TV and it does a bunch of stuff like the illumiroom stuff too yeah right and on that yeah I'm like we're gonna I think that will be the kinect for the right the mid cycle kicker that they call the connection to 360 I mean ol umer maitre CF and that is also like that is the thing that Michaels pushing that Sony isn't Sonja's like we've got a new camera and its motion but it's great for games I gotta be nice I used to connect now I still use it for voice all the time will run to the kitchen Xbox pause I'm like I'm totally sold really yes that seems totally insane nobody knows there's my neighbors I still feel weird pulling out my phone and something a siri-like hey it barely works my neighbors must hate me because they probably just here through the hall screen xbox can pause that works thank you should it should know no matter what you're doing yeah I'm starts screaming supplies do you need a minute it's like I'm sorry just like I'm out now I got 45 minutes Sonali does Microsoft like have the technology maybe something is like almost getting there with its new i toid like Microsoft that's what it wants I think if that's the perception is giving like we want entertainment and we just want to be able to just talk don't pick up a control or don't worry about your smartphone just say something so you think voice is really like the ballgame here that's where we go next know is that I think voice is great and I think it's useful but I think there's just too much as a primary interface there's too much mystery to it I think if you have an xbox that has multiple input sources and like apps and a browser and TV and games there are too many ways to go and it's not going to help you get there if you're just talking at it place to go like you don't know what to say to your TV basically I think it's too mysterious of an interface I think I think when the house nowadays I'll remember to like cereal see on this is Leah halcyon it to come and raise my eight already vocabulary a computer is not well delight no no but like okay what are you use Siri for nothing no you set the alarm with it and that's it yeah but I did it already I was like every weekdays never stop but I'm happy like that that's all I want I don't need it to do everything I just need to do things that are make no sense for touch and that's staying with xbox too I don't want to find the controller when I want to pause the thing I just want to turn it on as useless though like I don't need to like if I'm sitting down I can like push a button oh no actually I'm happy about that I don't want look to the controller and then use voice the resident in voice where we were with touch before the original iphone right which is right everybody knew a bad touch interfaces were like and they were terrible in the iphone come out and everyone was like this is gonna be terrible because they were all uniformly terrible and right now everyone's experience with voice interfaces is not so much Siri it's like robot calling menus yes where you just scream at it hits zero until like hope something a human being and it can understand your needs to be a chair aside you are like I give up take me to that it's called controller yeah like that's the zero of the xbox and I think most people are even I don't want to deal with this like this is still at that level and that's where the kinect is for me right now it doesn't always understand me in terms of voice I figure the controller and use it i think they need to get they need that kind of transformative leap in the technology and how effective it is before people accept it the way it's its controller plus it's like weird where there are things that we've just gotten used to use a controller for that actually really suck like in putting using as a keyboard like joystick left joystick right I gotta find the letter B just say the thing I want I want mommy burgers up were you gonna do they just a little bit yeah that's a like I think that thing up the intro no not again Bob's Burgers but ok I'll watch I'll watch hell's kitchen that's what I think Microsoft think that's what they're doing I think that's the most interesting is they're saying like instead of let's make the controller and console like really great and as good as possible and let's make the graphics great they're like let's expand how we do this and that's where connect comes in that's where illumiroom comes in they're like why even deal with your TV let's just blow it up beyond that right you're seeing a ton of companies do it it's not just the mic like valve is like doing like report like graphics are fine its marginal so valves like well let's chest your heart beat like that's barely with their testing connect compare do it the luma room thing is like passing to me I don't it feels like a novelty sure but it's fascinating yeah I mean it like I think it would be fascinating that worthy the mid-cycle refresh and like the stuff that they're showing off with it I mean that is a you'll need the additional graphics horsepower to make it happen and be that's like you can really change a gaming experience if you take it from beyond the TV to the entire room okay then I think we're going to go through if it does ever take off and I think the problem is just like with 3d you have to do something else like put glasses on a projector there but I think would be interesting is not let's expand the screen you've 106 inch TV of a 20 inch TV let's give you more space that's never going to look good because you have to build your living room around that but we were talking before the show like setting a mood like just make the whole room black and white or make it look like cartoony or whatever like set some kind of color tone and some kind of like a motion to go with what you're seeing right like I think they just can be abstract we're gonna do this on Kenny moment again hypothetically if it ever does take off right yeah all right well Ross Neil I thank you both very much I'm gonna go and I'm gonna invention illumiroom for my for my TV now BBC is doing it so I can do that's how I feel so there's there's a lot we still don't know about the xbox one and the ps4 in particular but in a lot of ways where we're going with the next generation of consoles it's kind of set so let's look at really where we are and where we go going forward you can now play games on your phone on your tablet or on your refrigerator but the best and most powerful experience is still console and three companies still dominate in the living room Nintendo Sony and Microsoft all three have shown off the devices that they hope will carry them for years to come or at least shown off some information about them so where are we now who's winning the next generation console for to start with the Wii U is really kind of its own thing it has a small hard drive and a slower processor but instead of offering limitless power and incredible graphics Nintendo stuck with the tactic that made the wii so popular get super immersive and crazy experiential do we use huge gamepad is its gimmick building a to screen experience into the console itself it's fun too but it can be confusing where you're supposed to look and not every game as well suited to having such a gigantic controller the xbox one in the PlayStation 4 on the other hand are more directly competitive and more normal they're both big consoles with standard controllers plus peripherals the promise to track your body and respond to your voice both come with eight core AMD processors 8 gigabytes of RAM PC like graphics processing a blu-ray drive USB 3.0 and Wi-Fi the connect on the one has a 1080p camera while the PlayStation 4 I is only 720p but both are wide angle and come with powerful microphones and voice recognition they both offer plenty of personalization totally revamped interfaces and near instant booting we don't know too much about the ps4 console itself but from what we're hearing it'll be more or less just like the Xbox one they both have different software but also fundamentally different visions of how you'll use a console in the future the Xbox one is all about TV and seamlessly integrating all the parts of your home theater system one voice command is all it takes to switch from TV 2 games to music to skype and back again the box is the hub it's the center of the Xbox universe on the other hand the PlayStation 4 is really more of a service than a box you'll be able to access games in the cloud download them to any supported tablet or portable console and keep your game saved and accessible no matter where you want to play they've plenty in common obviously all three consoles come with exclusive games access to netflix hulu and plenty of other services though the wii u definitely does lack of it in this department there's still time before the ps4 and Xbox one come out and we're going to find out a lot more soon at e3 but it looks like we're going to be in for one big battle do we want one box to rule them all or do we want to be able to access all our games and services from any place on any device that's it for a show thanks so much for watching thanks to ross miller nilay patel for being here we're taking a couple weeks off but we'll be back from e3 in LA with lots more on microsoft sony nintendo and basically every other gaming company on the planet we'll see you that