So both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 have launched. They've both managed to break down the barriers of sales records for their respective companies in the launch day category and they've both managed to underwhelm users as far as OS functionality goes. The latter of the list is supposedly up for some alterations, as Microsoft allegedly has “great things” in store for Xbox One users.
Gaming Bolt captured a number of Tweets from industry insider Ashan Rasheed, who goes by the alias of “Thuway”. He's been pretty spot-on as far as his “leaks” and insider info goes: he accurately predicted the resolution scale of Battlefield 4 for both the Xbox One and PS4, as well as warned us about the “teething issues” both consoles would suffer from Call of Duty: Ghosts' frame-stutter/micro-stutter.
Anyway, Thuway claims that there will be some major changes to the operating system of the Xbox One, but in a good way. Writing on Twitter, he stated...
“I am trying to get a good read on when the next Xbox One driver update happens. Should mean great things. Sometime in the next few weeks,”“Make no mistake about it. The team at Redmond working on the Xbox OS are probably the best OS programmers in the world.”
I wouldn't say all that about “best OS programmers in the world”... there's probably some Russian kid in a dank looking hut that used to be gulag, hashing out an amazing set of zeroes and ones while getting by on moldy bread and stale popcorn, working up an operating system the likes of which no one has seen before, only to get coughed on by a descendent of a Bolshevik and contract TB so no one ever gets to see or use the OS. But I digress.
Both the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 launched with measly, terrible UIs with bare-bones features and uninteresting user control options. I was especially disappointed with the Xbox One's OS given that these are the same folk who made Windows 8... then again, these are the same folks who made Windows 8.
Xbox One owners have very little or next to no control over their system. You can't see how much memory you have free (possibly as a way to limit users from feeling gypped that more than 130GB is reserved for system operations) and you have no memory management controls whatsoever. You can only install or delete apps/games/movies but you have no way of knowing if you're hitting the disk storage limit.
That's not to mention that there just seems to be an overall lack of options when it comes to network features (i.e., no throttling) as well as no options for controls and very few options for the audio and video (i.e., the only resolutions you can choose are 720 and 1080).
Hopefully the newest OS update will afford for more user control, better user control, a fix for the RAM caching issue and a speed up of the UI for both controllers and when using the Kinect.
The thing that bothers me the most about the system is the fact that it acts more like a restricted PC than an actual game console. Hopefully the second generation Xbox One (Xbox One Slim, perhaps?) will offer all the necessary user functionality right out of the box.
