Engadget said:

WINDOWS 10 ON XBOX ONE



Savvy Xbox One owners and "Metro"/"Modern" design enthusiasts likely already know this: The Xbox One OS is a version of Windows 8. The fact that the Xbox One dashboard looks strikingly similar to Windows 8 on a tablet is no mistake -- it's the same OS, to an extent. In this respect, Xbox One is getting a overhaul, though it might not look like a big difference at first.



"One of the monthly updates that you'll get on [Xbox One] is gonna change from the Windows 8 kernel that's in there now to the Windows 10 kernel," Microsoft Xbox lead Phil Spencer said during a group interview in Redmond, Washington, yesterday. "I know a lot of people are excited about things like Cortana and other features they see on Windows 10. Obviously getting on the Windows 10 kernel -- well, it's not really the kernel -- but Windows 10 OS inside of Xbox One is an important first step to unlock a lot of what [Microsoft's Joe Belfiore] showed."



Okay, let's back up: The long and short is that, during an upcoming monthly update to the Xbox One, the console is going to flip from being Windows 8-based to being Windows 10-based. That doesn't necessarily mean new features at first (stuff like Microsoft's voice-based personal assistant, Cortana, which Belfiore spoke about onstage yesterday), and it doesn't necessarily mean a dashboard refresh.



In the long run, however? That's exactly what it means. Spencer's talked to us about Cortana coming to Xbox One in the past, so it's not a huge surprise to hear that stuff is almost certainly heading to Microsoft's game console.



As for a refreshed look, this is the first we're hearing. Spencer's got nothing to say specifically, but he made sure to point out that the mockups shown onstage (seen below) were meant as little more than a conceptual visual.



"I don't want anybody to take away that that's the next dash for the Xbox," Spencer said. "We haven't talked about a new UI or anything. There's nothing wrong with that picture other than it's nothing that we said that's what we're going to ship. I don't want anybody to go off in the wrong direction on the pictures." The point, he said, was to present a broad variety of devices running Windows 10 with "a common UI." That is indeed the long-term point of Windows 10 -- hell, even the short-term point -- but the visual above is not representative of the future look of the Xbox One OS.



So what will Windows 10 look like on Xbox One? Probably a lot like it does right now, albeit with refreshed universal apps (Photos, Music and more are all getting a refresh with multi-device use in mind) and DirectX 12 support (read: prettier graphics).