Microsoft's communications are always so unnatural. Why does Microsoft maintain this corporate communication style? Every announcement event is just so uncomfortable.<p>These are clearly executives on stage whose asset is leadership, but they insist on injecting unnatural banter & distracting idioms. What corporate communications person hears a marketing manager talking about "photons" w/r/t kinect and doesn't cringe?<p>Is it just momentum within a communications team? Is it that they can't abandon this style because it's so deeply embedded in their communications team's culture? Or does this style actually work on some market segment?
Most annoying to me, is we're 30 minutes into the reveal, and they've still not discussed games. Literally, we've had about 7 seconds of a game playing in the background. As far as I people can tell, this would (so far) seem to be a voice controlled cable box.<p>Oh, and it looks like a shiny VCR. Bleh.<p>Edit: Ah, at 31 minutes, we have a games developer. Pity it's EA, but c'est la vie.
Did they discuss how you get TV onto the XBOX? Are they offering a service to get TV via your internet connection? I didn't see a coax port on the back of it...Or is this just an extension of windows media center and you need a PC in the background to act as the tuner?
"You can watch TV"<p>I can already watch TV.<p>And I don't want to be social while I watch TV, or buy tickets for a sequel while I watch a movie.<p>So far I haven't heard anything that has wowed me.
"Practically silent" means my wife will practically force me to buy one, as she (rightfully) complains about the jet engine turbines the launch day 360 uses for fans.<p>I've been holding off buying a dedicated Blu-ray player, so that has some value. Don't care about Kinect, not enough room in the TV room. Don't care about being "connected" as I have enough Skype-enabled, etc. devices around the house.<p>The hard questions are how Microsoft's ad service, er, Xbox Live will improve my experience. Right now I'm of the opinion that the XL experience has really gone down hill with poor UI and loaded with ads. How is the gaming experience? Is it really going to require "always on"? Do I <i>have</i> to physically hold up my controller to "raise a shield"? I just want to move my thumbs. Am I going to be nickeled-and-dimed with micro payments/DLC?<p>My point is, this is the first time I'll make an actual decision about buying a new Xbox. Halo made the first one a no-brainer for me. I bought the 2nd because I still worked at MSFT, and I was a company man. This time there is the real possibility that I won't buy an Xbox One. Give recent trends, they better make sure the experience doesn't suck. But I see EA is on the stage right now, so I'm not optimistic.
Unifying the TV Watching experience can be very awesome. Should be interesting to see what the actual cable companies think and how they integrate in the end.
I have to say I'm pretty disappointed in HN right now. I came to this thread hoping to see some good discussion but instead there's just a bunch of crap. I see a lot of complaining and comments at a very superficial level. Can we talk about the competition and their different strategies? Can we talk about any of the new things presented and whether or not they are interesting or valuable, and why? Can we talk about the technology? Can we talk about how Sony seems to have gone out of their way to court indie developers but MS didn't even mention them here?
Can somebody explain why HN's ranking algorithm has already pushed this submission to the second page? This seems inconsistent with its points, age and level of discussion relative to the articles ranked above. (I'm just asking out of curiosity and have no personal interest in having this post ranked higher or lower.)
There's an alternative stream at GT: <a href="http://www.gametrailers.com/netstorage/xboxcountdown/live.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.gametrailers.com/netstorage/xboxcountdown/live.ht...</a><p>The official one appears to have some bandwidth issues for me.
Did anyone manage to get a working video player on Linux? I messed around with trying to get it to play while listening to it(extremely choppy) on a windows VM. I actually went so far as to open up their video player since I couldn't find any URLs, and Fiddler wasn't helping, but then it was over.
I'm pretty impressed with the device but I was expecting a LOT more when they started talking about sports. Especially considering that live sports is one of the last bastions of television. Fantasy football and "taunting friends on Skype" is not what I consider an ultimate experience.
If they can really wrangle all of the other sources to come through and be controllable by the xbox, that would be very cool. Maybe my parents will be able to work our tv without us having to write detailed instructions.
From the web:<p>"8 gigs of RAM, USB 3.0, Wi-Fi Direct, a Blu-Ray disc drive, 64-bit architecture and "practically silent operation." Super fast switching of TV inputs between TV, Gaming, Skype,IE etc. Runs the Windows NT kernel.
Kinect 2.0 also gets a substantial upgrade. Whitten promised the integrated camera will have a wider field of view, and the sensor will be able to detect more joints, to include rotation of wrists and shoulders. "When you are exercising it can read your heartrate."