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Xbox One thoughts

So Microsoft revealed their forthcoming replacement for the Xbox 360 last night and I sat down and watched it with my wife as we are both gamers and were excited about this event.

I’m still excited about the Xbox One even if the presentation didn’t go down particularly well with a lot of people. Hardcore gamers are annoyed that there was very little about games last night, but that wasn’t what last night was really about. E3 will be the big reveal for the games.

My favourite comment by Amy was when she talked about how cheap she thought the suits were. Can’t Microsoft employees afford better suits!

The Xbox One was being heavily promoted as the entertainment hub of the living room which is fine with me. We’re pretty much using our 360 as the entertainment hub already, we used to watch DVDs on it until we finally got a Bluray player about 6 months ago and still watch BBC iPlayer and 4OD on it. I have no complaints in that regard and I’m sure given that the Xbox One is designed with that in mind from the start it will be better at these kind of things.

I don’t give a fuck about the partnership with the NFL, they never even explained what the fuck that entailed anyway. Halo television show was a cool bit of news but not really relevant.

The most interesting thing for me last night was this line from Marc Whitten.

The soul of the new system is the Xbox One architecture. Three operating systems in one.

Three operating systems in one and the instant switching between gaming and other Xbox features made me think straightaway that they are using virtualisation. I’ve since seen that this has been confirmed.

So it will be running a hypervisor, and then two virtual operating systems a cut down version of Windows 8 and then the Xbox gaming OS. This is a very sensible thing to do in my opinion and the instant switching if it works exactly as it did in the demo will be great.

Amy wasn’t as fascinated as I was with the underlying technologies of the system but she did like the design of the controllers a lot and the responsiveness of Kinect to voice and hand gestures. In addition she was excited by the idea of full screen Skype on it using the Kinect’s 1080p camera.

Overall even despite not seeing much in the way of gaming this household will be purchasing One on release.

By Matt Wharton

Matt Wharton is a dad, vlogger and IT Infrastructure Consultant. He was also in a former life a cinema manager.

Blogging here and at mattwharton.co.uk

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