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Originally Posted by LemonyBrainAid
Can anyone summarise their overall thoughts thus far? I'm finding it hard to find real people's experiences and not just tech reviews...
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Here's some thoughts on it: -
Controller - Great. Pretty much perfect in fact.
Console hardware - I like the look of it, but looks aren't massively important to me. It is really quiet, which is something I value much more than looks. One downside is that the PSU has a fan in it and if you set the console to use sleep mode, rather than powering it totally off, the PSU stays on 24/7 which obviously means the PSU fan does too.
Kinect - I didn't own the first Kinect, but I did use it and I wasn't very impressed with it. The voice controls are working for me about 95% of the time now that I am used to how they work. The redeem code feature is great and I like the auto-sign in via Kinect. I've only tried the Kinect Sports Rivals demo as far as motion control games go, but it seemed to work fine even though I was only standing about 5 feet from the Kinect. It's too early to say how good Kinect will be for gaming, but my early impressions are good.
Dashboard - I really like it. It has some missing features - for example, you can't see how much hard drive space is left and there's not even a way to see how much charge is left in the controller - but I prefer it over the 360's dashboard and it offers a lot of functionality that, for the most part, works great. I love that I can instantly switch between games and apps. The snap feature is cool too.
Apps - There's a bunch of apps available to download, but there are some noticeable omissions such as iPlayer (coming next year I believe). The apps I've tried work fine. The YouTube app is particularly good and you can use a phone/tablet to beam videos to the TV through the Xbox One, kinda like the Chromecast.
Disc-based playback - It works fine. The first time I played a Blu-Ray disc, the Blu-Ray playback app took a fairly long time to load, but after the first time it was faster.
Games - Games look great, given the specs of the hardware. Loading times can be quite long though. Also, while you can start playing a game while it's still installing/downloading, that's not much use with digital games because you'll often reach a dead end where it needs to download more of the game before you continue. Obviously, there's no way around that as it's dependent on how fast your connection can download the games, and some of them are 30GB+ in size.
Multiplayer - I've only played a couple of multiplayer matches in Ryse: Son of Rome. It worked fine, with no lag or drop-outs. I don't know if Ryse is using dedicated servers or P2P, but either way, it worked really well. That said, I was only playing a team based mode with 1 other player, so I can't comment on what multiplayer games are like when you have a bunch of folks playing. I haven't tried using Xbox Live parties yet, so I can't comment on those either.
TV - I haven't tested this at all yet.
All in all, I'm impressed with what I've tried. It seems to be the makings of a really solid all round machine. Updates will hopefully bring improvements, fixes and more features and apps. The hardware is great, although I wish the power brick fan wasn't active all the time when you use sleep mode. If you use the "fully off" mode, the power brick fan turns off, but it takes much longer to cold boot the console, you can't use "Xbox on" to turn it on, and it can't download games/updates in the background while it's sleeping. If you could buy a high quality, third party silent PSU for the Xbox One, I would definitely get one, but it's a shame that MS can't provide a silent one in the box.