Futurism for everyone.

The first thing that strikes you about the Xbox One is the simplicity of the tiles, these colored boxes that are everywhere and comprise everything. But that is a logical progression of the company’s design language. Then you notice the simplified layout, the three screens of Home, Pins, and Store. It all makes sense and all feels like inevitable improvement, which is what one might expect from a shiny new piece of technology. But it’s not until you say, “Xbox watch CNN,” then “Xbox snap Skype,” does the reality of Microsoft’s strategy hit you. With this new hardware enabled by the voice controls of the improved Kinect and connected to your cable box via HDMI, Microsoft has created the sort of gee-whiz, television-version-of-future technology we’ve been promised for years.

I want to play Forza, so I do. I want to check the news, so I snap my local TV channel into the sidebar and I am, but I’m still racing. And then I want to suspend all of it and Skype a friend and with only a few words, I am. This is Star Trek, with a computer that understands what I say. This is instant gratification, as apps and snapping happens in seconds. This is the videogame system completely at the players’ beck and call. It’s on your schedule: you can suspend a game at any point and come back to it hours later and immediately resume.

Read the full article at Kill Screen.