10 Things You Need To Know About The New Microsoft Xbox One

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Today (May 21), Microsoft unveiled its highly anticipated next generation console, the Xbox One. Sporting an industrial design and powerful specs, the system aims to be the focus, or facilitator, of family entertainment.

Whether it’s gaming, utilizing web apps, watching movies and more, the Xbox One hopes to be the centerpiece of your living room (think: all in one). It certainly has the tools to do so with a Blu Ray player, an improved Kinect (which will come with every console), 500GB of storage standard, HDMI connectivity and much, much more.

No word on pricing or an exact release date yet. Check out 10 important aspects of Microsoft Xbox One (so much for an “Xbox 720”) in the following pages.

Will it be a Playstation 4 killer? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

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Photos: Engadget, Gizmodo, Wired

What’s it look like? We say an industrial looking Blu-Ray player, but we will let you decide.

The specs on the Xbox One are robust.

Reports Engadet:

There’s an octa-core processor based on AMD’s Jaguar design and 8GB of RAM to go up against the Sony PlayStation 4, plus USB 3.0 ports, 500GB of hard drive storage, WiFi Direct for communicating with the new controller and other devices, and a humungous amount of silicon to drive it all: no fewer than five billion transistors, which compares to 1.4 billion in your average Intel or AMD chip (although Microsoft may be included other processors and DSPs in that count). And just in case you’re wondering, the switch to an x86 PC-style architecture will indeed preclude backwards compatibility with 360 games.

A next-gen console means a next-gen controller. The Xbox One’s controller still looks similar to it predecessor but has design tweaks including a re-designed d-pad and “rumble” capability.

Every Xbox One will arrive with a new and improved Kinect motion controller. It’s so sensitive it can allegedly calculate your heartbeat. Cheaters everywhere are clearly hoping that a lie detector game doesn’t hit the market.

Yeah, they’re a little late to the party, but to go along with that 500GB hard drive, the Xbox One will have a slot loading Blu-Ray disc player.

The system will have 15 exclusive titles its first year out. But more importantly, the Xbox One will not be backwards compatible with Xbox 360 games. That’s kinda like a big deal.

You may have heard of the Frostbite 3 game engine, but Electronic Arts also has a new one called EA Sports Ignite that will power games including FIFA, Madden NFL, NBA Live and UFC.

When it comes to the Xbox 360, Xbox Live is running on 15,000 servers. For the Xbox one, that’s getting bumped to 300,000 serveres. 3, hundred, thousand.

A “snap mode” let you use two applications at once, like surfing the Internet while playing a game. This can adversely effect your KD ration in shooters, though.

As usual, Xbox One will get Call Of Duty DLC first, including the franchises upcoming Call Of Duty: Ghosts title. [shakes fists]