I received my Xbox One back in November.  I have some observations to share after something approaching six months living with the big black box.

• There are no where near enough good games available yet for the Xbox One.  Titanfall is out, but yet another multiplayer shooter isn’t really all that appealing
• I expect the game selection to improve vastly by this fall
• the One itself is solid, quiet, and performs well.  The hardware hasn’t shown any quirks at all yet
• There were some pretty serious shortfalls with the Xbox One software initially.  Forming up and communicating via parties was clumsy in the extreme, the friends interface was inefficient, and everything felt slower than it should because of the multiple steps through the UI that always seemed to be necessary.
• Microsoft has been doing an impressive job fixing up those shortfalls with a fairly quick release schedule.  The improvements since January in particular have been remarkable.  I would say there is still room for improvement: adding friends to a party still feels slower than it should be, and looking up friends and their achievements is sluggish.  But I’m happy with where things are heading
• The Kinect is… interesting, but not exactly overwhelming.  I’m probably not the “target demographic”, which seems to be people who use their Xbox One as a “home entertainment center”.  I don’t hate the Kinect, though, so it could be worse
• It is finally possible to hook up a third party chat / audio headset.  Microsoft starting shipping the headset adapter in March

Continue reading The Xbox One- Six months later →