Xbox One lets you watch TV and snap in apps on the side. A happy family: the controller, the Kinect, and the Xbox One. The side panels of the Kinect echo the venting panel on top of the Xbox One console, and the multi-mic array is separated from the main body, making the sensor appear to levitate. The all-seeing eye on the Kinect. The new controller, with redesigned shoulder buttons. From the top, the 50-50 split (glossy solid panel/matte vented panel) is clearly visible. Nice detail work. Microsoft has introduced Xbox Fitness, a library of workout videos designed to work with Kinect's enhanced skeletal tracking.

WIRED Plays games, but also adds useful functionality to your cable TV setup. Improved voice commands, multitasking between games, movies, TV, et cetera. TIRED Voice input still hit-or-miss. Does live TV but does not let you control your DVR. No broadcasting gameplay (yet). Rechargeable controller batteries an expensive add-on, not standard.

Many game consoles aspire to be more than just a game console, but Xbox One really means it. Xbox One wants to be your everything and run your TV, your Blu-rays, your streaming, your music and, oh, sure, your videogames too. It wants to do it all with Kinect, the camera controller that’s included in every box, letting you use voice commands to control everything.

And sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it’s magical, sometimes it’s inept; Xbox One is the Ron Weasley of consoles.

Game consoles often go through long periods of inactivity, but we have used our Xbox One every day since we got it. We will continue to use Xbox One every single day. This is by design. Xbox One not only has an HDMI out port, it has an HDMI in. That will allow you to daisy-chain any device and view it through the Xbox One interface (even a PlayStation 4, if you want). But it’s intended, and we are using it, for your cable box.

Run your cable feed through your Xbox and you can control most of it with OneGuide, the built-in TV guide app. By saying, “Xbox, watch Bravo,” the Xbox One will (in all likelihood) change the channel to Bravo and you can watch Millionaire Matchmaker . How does it change the channel? That’s the Kinect at work; in addition to being a camera and a microphone it is also an IR blaster, sending out signals all over your room that bounce off you and everything and instantly find their way to your cable box to change the channel.

This works with your TV as well. Xbox One can turn your TV on and off, raise the volume, etc. Setting this up, for me, was painless; you pick your cable provider and the models of your box and television. Since I have the standard Comcast Motorola box and a Sony television, there was little chance of them not being listed. Xbox One is its own universal remote. (Of course, it can also run apps like Netflix et cetera — a whole laundry list of them actually — but we weren’t able to test any of these since they only went live as we were finishing up this review.)

Is it that much more convenient to yell voice commands at your TV versus just using a handheld remote? It is when you have a refreshing Mountain Dew in one hand and crunchy, flavorful Doritos in the other, and I think that’s the point. No, no one watches live TV anymore, and no, Xbox One doesn’t have DVR functionality. But after we start up a DVR’ed show with the standard remote, we can say “Xbox, fast forward” to skip the commercials instead of having to find the remote again. Xbox One might not do everything (yet), but it is purely additive to the experience, not subtractive.

For the most part, I mean. Here’s the catch: Once your TV programming is controlled by the Xbox, it’s controlled by the Xbox. There’s no passive signal — if your Xbox One is powered off, you can’t watch TV anymore. Sometimes, when I power on the Xbox One, it boots up relatively quickly. But there were at least two times when I powered it on and it went to an unexplained green loading/update/something bar, then lingered on the Xbox One logo screen for a long time. I timed it once: Four minutes from power on to watching TV. I don’t want to watch live TV four minutes from now; I want it now.

On that note: You’re supposed to be able to say “Xbox, On” to turn the Xbox One on, but it rarely worked for us for some reason that we can’t figure out. Once the thing is actually on, voice commands work pretty well, with two caveats. One, you have to know what to say. The old “if you see it on the screen, you can say it” rule from using Kinect voice on Xbox 360 seems to no longer be in operation. We put in a Blu-ray and the icon on screen said “Play Disc,” so we said “Xbox, play disc” and that didn’t work and we said “Xbox, Blu-ray player” and that didn’t work and this went on for a few minutes until we just picked up the controller in exasperation.

Caveat two: Voice commands really didn’t work for us when we had a group of people in the room. Even if we actively tried to get everyone to stop their conversations so that we could tell the Xbox to switch to Project Runway (and won’t that get old fast), we found that just having more bodies in the room caused the Xbox to just not recognize the voice commands.

But when nobody else is in the room? You walk in, sit down in front of the TV, and “Hi Chris!” pops up on the screen. My wife comes in, it recognizes her, and now we’re automatically both signed in. No more having to connect two controllers to have two profiles active. “Xbox, show my stuff,” she says, and the dashboard switches from my preferred games and apps to her customized layout. (Magical!) “Xbox, show my stuff,” I say, and nothing changes. It interprets the command perfectly — but it thinks I’m her, for some reason. Try again, try again, try again, pick up the controller in exasperation and log myself in manually. (Hermione, I need you to look over my Charms homework.)

Yeah, But What About Games?

The Xbox One controller isn’t going to change the world. It’s pretty much the Xbox 360 controller you’re already used to, maybe a little more comfortable. The force feedback is a little more specific — when I was playing the action game Ryse: Son of Rome and pulled the right trigger to have my squadron of centurions heave their spears in unison, I could feel the rumble right underneath the trigger that I was pulling. So there’s that.

Otherwise, it is as you expect. The only downside is that it uses two AA batteries by default. Battery packs come separate, and if you want to buy a controller with a lithium battery and a micro USB cable, it will cost you seventy-five god damned dollars. (PS4’s controller has a rechargeable battery built in for $60 — still expensive, but less so.) At least you can just plug a micro USB cable into the controller and the Xbox and use it without any batteries at all.

Like PlayStation 4, Xbox One aims to take the work out of play. Whether you buy a game from the integrated digital store or on a disc at your local GameStop, all games have to be installed to the Xbox One’s 500 GB hard drive before they’ll run. And of course, digital games must first be downloaded. But you don’t have to sit around and wait for this. Once a game is some small portion of the way into its download or install, you can start playing it immediately. This is very cool. (Of course, having to install all of your games instead of just being able to play them from the discs is a step backward in terms of player experience. Although it’ll probably cut down on loading times across the board. And you’ll probably run out of those 500 gigs pretty damn fast if you play a lot of games.)

Once you’re in a game, there’s no huge differences — you still get Achievements that get added to your Gamerscore, which carries over from the Xbox 360 (although precious little else does, as the devices are not backward compatible). Like PS4, Xbox One has a recording function that lets you save a clip of the last few minutes of your gameplay. Unlike PS4, where you have to reach over and hit the “Share” button on the controller, with Xbox One you can just say “Xbox, record that” and it’ll save the clip. You’ll then be able to go into the Upload Studio app (which isn’t live yet, so we couldn’t try it) and record live commentary for the clip, then upload it for all to see. Games will also automatically record clips of what it thinks are cool moments, which you can go back to and view later (and which are automatically deleted after a while unless you save them).

Xbox One was supposed to let you broadcast your gameplay sessions over Twitch (again, like Sony’s PS4), but just today Microsoft said this wouldn’t be ready until 2014.

But you don’t have to decide whether to watch TV or play games. With Xbox One, you can have both. Pressing the Xbox button on the controller will jump you right back into the home menu, and you can open other apps and features while your gameplay remains paused in the background. Once you’re done with whatever, you can go right back to the game.

If you want to take your multitasking to a whole new level, the “snap” feature lets you run apps in a windowed mode that occupies approximately the rightmost quarter of the TV screen. So you can play a game while watching TV, if you want, although the snapped TV picture is pretty small even on a big TV. You can open Internet Explorer while watching Hulu. Etc.

We tried out Snap in various configurations and everything seemed to work well. But it again illustrated a problem with Xbox One’s interface. We could not figure out at all how to stop controlling the snapped window and switch back to the main one. We tried everything we could think of until we finally just closed all the windows and stopped using Snap. Finally, I said, “Xbox, help.” This did in fact take me to a remarkably polished help menu, where I could access video tutorials including exactly what I needed. As it turned out, you can say “Xbox, switch” or you can double-tap the Xbox button on the controller — neither of which I would have thought of.

And that pretty much encapsulated my experience with Xbox One: It does a lot of things, and in a way that you may find extremely helpful, but you’ll need to take the time to learn how to do them — and learn by trial and error when it’s best to just stop trying.

All photos: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED unless otherwise noted

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