Xbox One Announced, Has Specs Almost Equivalent To PS4

Microsoft has officially announced the next generation of Xbox consoles. It's not called the Xbox 720, Infinity or Fusion. The next gen console is called Xbox One and it's built from the ground up around Kinect and Xbox Live. Surprisingly, though, there was no mention of Illumiroom.

Microsoft let loose some sparkling details on the next-gen console and it's almost entirely powered by Kinect. The console's OS will be powered by Windows 8 and allows users to easily and conveniently bounce between watching TV, listening to music, watching movies and playing games using gestures and voice-control thanks to Kinect. Microsoft has made it clear that there are three tiers to the OS, with Kinect being the first, the Windows 8 tablet design being the second and Xbox Live being the third.

The Xbox One will be sporting the octocore processor, just as it was mentioned in the rumors, at an announced clockspeed. USB 3.0 support will be available. Wifi direct support is built-in. Blu-ray support has also been confirmed. The system will also contain 5 billion transistors and 8GB of RAM. What kind of RAM? Who knows...well, Microsoft does. But you can guess that based on the rumored specs you can expect that it's DDR3. Sadly nothing Microsoft unveiled told us anything different than the rumors from a while back and it puts the Xbox One just on par or a little behind the PS4 in RAW processing power.

The system will play a large part in social and network interconnectivity. You'll be able to easily access Skype no matter what you're doing and there are personalized settings to enable profile switching on the fly for those using Kinect as a media hub for content.

The Xbox One is scheduled to released this holiday season and we can expect more details at this year's E3. How well does it stack up against the PS4? Well, right now I'm still giving the edge to Sony since they were a bit more clear about their intentions. Need more info? Feel free to visit the official Xbox website.