Xbox One Follow-Up Review

Per RayRay's request, I'm doing a follow-up on my initial Xbox One review.

For the most part, I'm as happy with it today as I was the day I set it up.  I'm still pleasantly surprised with the quality of the voice commands, but I must admit that it annoyed me when my older daughter decided to mess with me by saying "Xbox pause" during the middle of my favorite shows.  That little prank was short-lived though, when she realized that two could play that game.

There's also a cool smart phone add-on called Xbox One SmartGlass, which allows you to control the Xbox from your smart phone.  My favorite use of this so far was to randomly pause Netflix when my brother-in-law was watching something.  That, by the way, was a one-time prank... I wanted to play a practical joke, not piss him off.

On the downside, there's a severe shortage of split-screen games.  Though we use Xbox one as our media hub, I miss playing split-screen games with my kids.  Hopefully this will work itself out as more games are released.  (I considered Forza 5, but I'm not going to spend $60 on a game that effectively requires you to buy add-ons through micro-transactions.  Note to the gaming industry:  If this is the way you want to go, I will NOT be buying your games!)

My last complaint seems to be working itself out.  For a couple of weeks around Christmas, we were having problems signing on to Xbox Live, Hulu, Netflix and Amazon Prime.  This isn't a big deal for me, because I use my PC as a backup method of connecting to Hulu, Netflix and Amazon Prime.  It was, however, inconvenient and irritating... especially when it acted up after I went to bed and my daughter woke me up because she couldn't watch her favorite shows.  These inconveniences, however, should be expected when you're an early adopter of a new technology.  Let me correct that... it SHOULDN'T be expected, but it's an unfortunate fact of life.

Overall, I'm still pleased with the XBox One.  I just bought my second game (Battlefield 4) and when it comes to gaming, I still believe that the Xbox One is a major improvement to its predecessor.  There are several games I'm looking forward to purchasing and playing.