10 Things You Didn't Know The Xbox One Can Do

We had a million burning questions when we sat down in Venice Beach, California this week to play around with the Xbox One for nearly an hour. During our time with the console, not all of those questions were answered. But some were.

How does the Xbox One interact with the other devices in your living room? How does it handle your fantasy football team? What does it do if there are multiple users in the room? What happens if you get a Skype call in the middle of playing Forza?

These are some of the questions that Microsoft's been dodging over the last several months, but they've been foremost in our minds ever since the company's earnest strategy to be the one and only living room entertainment hub became evident this year. After all, we can't know whether we're going to want the Xbox One as our number one media device if we can't see how all its many pieces fit together.

It will still be a little while before our full Xbox One review goes up, but in the meantime here are ten things we recently learned about the new Xbox that you may not have known it can do.

This may seem obvious, but there was a time, long, long ago, when we might have guessed the same about the Xbox 360's ability to recognize users' voice commands. And we all know how that turned out.

Thankfully we've got good news: as far as we could tell during our time with the console this week, the Xbox One's new Kinect sensor seems to be much, much better at understanding and carrying out users' vocal orders.

In fact, if your practical use of the Xbox One is anything like the demonstration we were given, you'll be using voice commands for almost everything when using the Xbox One, whether you're switching between apps, changing the channel, or booting up a game.

One of our biggest gripes about the Xbox 360 is that there's no way to customize its home screen (or "dashboard" as we used to say). No matter what you did, Microsoft curated all the content you'd see when you turned the console on, from large ads to a few paltry choices like "pins" and the option to start the game disc.

On the Xbox One, though, things are much more convenient. You still won't be customizing the first page you see when you boot up the console (that's what pins are for—check the next slide), but the Xbox One's home screen will be tailored for you automatically.

Its main tiles are comprised of the experiences and apps you were last using, so it's convenient to go right back to what you were doing when you quit. And it's unique for every individual user with a profile.

The really nice thing about the Xbox One's home page is that just to the left of the initial screen are each user's pins. Instead of having to select this category of favorite apps and games, you can see them virtually right away. And you can pin 25 items right there, making it much faster to get right into your favorite content.

There are also many more things you can pin now. You can still pin games and apps for easy access, but you can also pin albums, entire artists, movies, websites, Skype contacts, and more. And like everything else on the Xbox One, the pins displayed will differ depending on which user is signed in.

If there are multiple users in the room, then the Xbox One will display the content of the first user who signed in or the one who last said, "Xbox, show my stuff."

Microsoft really wants the Xbox One to be the only device you need to control everything in your living room, and to ensure that's possible they gave the new Kinect an IR blaster. That means it can control virtually anything that you control with a remote, including your TV and any AV receivers you might be using for external speakers.

The Kinect sends infrared signals bouncing around the room until they reach whatever it is you're trying to communicate. That way it can control the volume on your TV or your speakers, change the channel on the TV or the cable box, and conceivably do more than that.

The Xbox One also features HDMI-in capabilities. That means you can route the cable box through the console, which enable another important feature called Xbox OneGuide.

The Xbox One interacts with your cable box in two ways: by sending it infrared signals from Kinect to change the channel, and by interpreting data sent from the cable box through an HDMI cable to the console to create the Xbox OneGuide.

The OneGuide is a super TV guide that displays all the information you're used to seeing in your cable company's normal guide, but with several more perks. For one thing, you can call out the names of channels or programming and Kinect will switch to them automatically.

There's also a favorites section that lets you pin cable channels, as well as channels from another unique section called "app channels." In app channels, services like Hulu and Machinima can create curated channels of content like trending clips and popular movies. And it's easy to pull content from all these different sources right onto your favorites list.

As you may have surmised by now, there's a lot going on with the Xbox One. But unlike the Xbox 360 and other past consoles, switching between apps and services on Xbox One is ridiculously easy.

A voice command of "Xbox, go to TV," "Xbox, go to Skype," "Xbox, go to Forza Motorsport 5," or "Xbox, go home" will land you exactly where you want to be. And it all happens in a matter of seconds, even if you switch between apps continuously with just a moment's break in between. The Xbox One never broke a sweat during our time testing it this week.

Switching between apps all willy-nilly might be a problem if the Xbox One had to quit an app every time you leave it, but thankfully that's not the case.

Here's a hypothetical: you're playing Ryse, or Forza, or whatever. You get a Skype call and answer it (with a voice command, of course). When the call is over, you forget what you were doing and start watching TV. While you're watching TV, you remember that you were stuck in the game, so you pin Internet Explorer up on one side of the screen ("Xbox, snap Internet Explorer") and look up what to do.

When you go back to the game—again, with voice commands, by saying "Xbox, go to Forza Motorsport 5" or "Xbox, go to Ryse: Son of Rome"—it will pick up literally exactly where you left off, like it was just minimized the whole time.

Are you addicted to gaming achievements? Then you may want to skip reading this slide. And also plug your ears any time someone mentions the words "media achievements."

They're exactly what they sound like: achievements that are unlocked for things that aren't video games. For example, there might be achievements for Netflix or Hulu that unlock when you watch ten movies in a single weekend, or when you start a new TV series.

These media achievements won't affect your gamerscore, which remains just for game achievements. But they will affect your addictive personality.

The Xbox One's Kinect impressed us greatly over the hour or so we spent in front of it. Compared to the old Kinect it's like night and day.

The new Kinect understands your voice commands better, of course, but it also recognizes users as they step into its frame. Signing in and having the console display your items, pins and preferences is as easy as saying "Xbox, show my stuff," and it recognizes each user's voice as well.

One of the most subtle and impressive features of the Xbox One's Kinect occurs during Skype calls. When one person is in the frame it automatically zooms in on that person's face. When another person enters, it zooms out to encompass both users. It can also pan and tilt, and it's all done digitally; the sensor itself never moves.

We didn't get to see the Xbox One's fantasy football feature, unfortunately, but Microsoft did drop a hint about it while we were there.

Apparently as part of Microsoft's partnership with the NFL your fantasy football players will update automatically during live games. The ESPN app on the Xbox One appears to be quite robust, and there's clearly going to be a lot of functionality there for football fans.

The full extent of that, as well as the rest of the Xbox One's capabilities, for now remains a mystery. But it's not going to stay that way much longer! Keep an eye out for our full Xbox One review in the coming weeks.