By Jennifer Tan AKA Mrs Fett
When Microsoft announced their next big console at E3 last year, the response was a roar of anger and confusion. Always on Kinect, mandatory internet, and the inability to share a used game with friends sent Microsoft into a PR nightmare.
Luckily, with some damage control, and an aggressive marketing strategy for their midnight launches, they gained consumer faith back.
Their most recent massive update attacked not only software issues, but hardware as well.
The biggest news on this update is that you can now SEE when your friends are online. This might just be me, but I would have thought that would have been the First feature they released with their console. There’s now a silent reboot feature added for auto on consoles, and progress bars to keep up on the status of pending downloads and uploads.
Kinect also got its own reboot. Better voice and gesture response, and an Xbox One sound bar running at $300. Not necessarily the best, but a good starting point. The design is a little bulky, but the quality is great, sounds good, and is light enough for easy mounting.
Xbox One controllers and headset adapters are now more responsive, a sigh of relief for those of us forced to use the headphone adapter for third party headsets.
The techs will enjoy improved GameDVR video quality through compression algorithm improvements.
And last but certainly not least is the Bluray player supports 50 Hz video output for content recorded at 50 Hz. We’ll also be updating the Bluray Player app in the coming days to round out these improvements.
These steps are going to help Microsoft in their next gen battle, but the real test will always lie in the games that they own as exclusives. What’s the point of having the best console, with the worst games? Hopefully Destiny and Evil Within will keep them contending.
