We take a look at the Xbox One a year on

Talk about a turnaround: last year the Xbox One was widely portrayed as the loser of the latest console war. Seemingly designed more around Microsoft’s strategic objectives than, say, building the best machine for playing games, it was underpowered, overpriced and saddled with an expensive peripheral – Kinect 2.0 – that nobody seemed to want. For all its advanced features and functions, most reviewers agreed that it wasn’t as strong a package as Sony’s PS4. Judging by the sales – with roughly 14 million PS4s sold to the Xbox One’s 10 million shipped – most of the early adopters have thought so too.

Yet Microsoft won’t go down easy. It’s refocused the Xbox One message, with less distracting nonsense about TV, video and convergence, and more of an emphasis on games. It’s made Kinect an option rather than an integral part of the system and reduced the price. It’s made valuable system resources that were previously locked up by the OS and Kinect open to game developers, helping reduce some of the PS4 performance gap. Most importantly, it’s delivered the kind of games that will sell consoles in the key pre-Christmas season. If you’re more a jam today than jam tomorrow kind of person, then the Xbox One is arguably the stronger contender – and it’s future is beginning to look a little brighter all round.

Xbox One - Hardware

There’s no getting away from the fact that the Xbox One is a big, blocky chunk of black or white plastic. While the half-gloss, half-matt finish attempts to give the console a touch of glamour, but it’s more a functional design than a stylish one, and one that seems a step backwards after the svelte Xbox Slim. At 333mm x 78mmm x 276mm it’s noticeably chunkier than the PS4 (275mm x 53mm x 305mm) and to make things worse you have to find space in your AV setup for an external power supply that’s only slightly smaller than the monster brick supplied with the last-gen systems.

Source: www.trustedreviews.com