My Xbox Honey Do List

I use my Xbox One console almost daily, so I have my own wish list of improvements that I would personally find beneficial for the way I use it. And yes, I've gone ahead and submitted or upvoted these ideas on the Xbox Uservoice forum (for which I applaud Microsoft for supporting).  For context, my main console is the original Day One Edition (stock 500 GB internal hard drive), with an external 240GB SSD attached via a USB 3.0 enclosure (which supports UASP) to hold my most frequently played games. BTW, putting your games on an external SSD makes them load MUCH faster, so it's worth doing even if you can't afford a big SSD drive.

So here is my prioritized wish list:

1) Faster boot or EnergyStar stand-by: My console takes a little over a minute to show me the home screen from a cold (power savings mode) boot. If I feel like gaming, my routine is to turn on the console, go do something else (like fill up my water bottle), and then come back. Compare this to15-20 secs cold boot with my Windows PCs, or 25 secs for the Xbox 360. I realize that putting the console into the Instant On mode would address this, but I can't get myself to leave it drawing 15 Watts of energy all the time doing nothing. I'm kind of obsessed with energy efficiency and doing my part for the environment, and if you multiply 15 Watts times all the Xbox One owners, that becomes a very significant contribution to wasted energy. I don't need the Kinect always listening, and I'm even ok with it not installing updates in the background. Just give me my instant gratification!

2) Snappy UI: This one probably drives me the most crazy. From the dashboard, if you click to the left to access Friends and others frequently used apps, I often experience a delay of 3-4 secs before that left menu bar appears. From a human factors perspectives, this is so long that it leaves me assuming that the controller input was not recognized, causing me to repeat the input, which gets buffered, and often sends me the wrong menu. This makes me feel like I have to slow down, wait, and delicately lead the Xbox UI to the destination I have in mind.  I suggest that UI performance get prioritized in a future system update. I'd rather wait longer for the dashboard to load to load the required input background tasks than have to deal with the frustration of my controller clicks flying all over the place from lag and buffering. Even giving me some kind of real time audio feedback that my controller input has been received would be helpful to avoid redundant inputs.

3) Reliable voice chat (bonus: higher quality voice audio): Although it doesn't happen often, there have still been a number of times when my friends & I could not successfully join each other's chat parties. Worst case, it would outright error out. Sometimes it hangs saying "Connecting" but does not successfully connect. Other times there is a specific person who can't be heard by another specific person. This then leads to players attempting fixes like logging out and back into Xbox Live, rebooting the console, and rebooting routers. Microsoft has their excellent and popular Skype service, which is what my kids & I use when gaming on a PC. It connects quickly and reliably, and the voice quality is noticeably better than Xbox One's voice chat (less latency, higher fidelity). While I recognize that Skype runs on a distinct server infrastructure than Xbox Live, I'm just sayin' that it would be awesome to leverage Skype's capabilities to improve the first party Xbox voice chat from a reliability and audio fidelity perspective. At a bare minimum, it should be so reliable that users just know it will work when we click "Join" vs. today's situation where my heart rate spikes in anxious anticipation of waiting to see what happens.

4) All SSD upgrade path: Once you go SSD, you never go back, and the price of SSDs continues to fall over time. Additionally, it is an inevitable certainty that all mechanical hard drives will degrade in performance over time and eventually crash. I admire the Sony's approach that enables players to fairly easily upgrade the internal drive of the PS3 and PS4, while the Xbox One only supports external storage upgrades. Microsoft's approach is admittedly hitting a good sweet spot, giving users the ability to add storage technology of their choice (big mechanical drives, small but fast SSDs, or hybrid drives for little of both) to improve game load times (where SSDs see the most significant performance gains). Making the internal drive non-user serviceable gives Microsoft the ability to optimize the console chassis design for size & airflow (similar to how Apple chose not to make iPhone batteries user replaceable). Another benefit to external storage that I just recently realized is that I can take a game that I installed on my external drive, and plug it into another console to side-load it (using the "copy" command on the Xbox) instead of downloading it again. This is a much faster way to install a game, along with saving bandwidth. For myself, I prefer the clean approach of having a monolithic console with no external components wired to it, along with the fastest possible performance for both boot and game loading. Thus, having the option to bring my own internal drive would be ideal.

5) Virtual surround sound: I've been using Astro Mixamps for years starting with the Xbox 360, and was sold on the legitimate value of virtual surround sound processing with stereo headphones when playing Call of Duty. The gaming community even coined the phrase "sound whoring" for the practice of leveraging positional audio to locate opponents and get the drop on them. It is literally like having a constant radar for games that utilized good positional audio. While I really like my Astro Mixamp, it is somewhat of a mess of cables to use it, and I would love to see this feature integrated directly into the console and controller.

Virtual surround sound is not about making up surround audio from a stereo audio source, but is about taking audio with real discrete surround sound data, and applying real time psycho-acoustics to yield the same perceived audio experience but with stereo audio speakers. If you think about it, your ears are stereo, yet we have the ability to infer 3 dimensional audio because our brain applies real time psycho-acoustics from our two ears. Dolby Headphone is one of the most popular virtual surround technologies out there, but it's not cheap, likely requiring a royalty per device that it ships on. There are other solutions out there, but I can't speak to how they compare to Dolby, which I consider the gold standard (as I know for a fact that they put significant science & research into designing the tech). I'm guessing that Microsoft considered this feature, but found that it was too expensive to license and would not be valuable enough to allow them to charge extra for it, or would not be a compelling and differentiating feature to help them win the console war. Additionally, it would upset the partners like Astro, Turtle Beach, Mad Catz and others who make high end gaming headsets with this unique feature. Maybe Microsoft has some IP in this field and could roll their own, or they could negotiate a reasonable license with Dolby or another third party to bring this into all Xbox One consoles. This all assumes that the processing load for this feature is relatively light so that it could be added as a simple system software update vs. requiring a dedicated microprocessor.

6) Prioritize Xbox Live sign-in for already-active sessions: I have one console where I game, and one in my living room. Sometimes I'll be in the middle of a game, and then I'm suddenly booting out with a message telling me that I was signed in on a different console. This usually happens because a family member decided to turn on the living room console to workout with the Xbox Fitness app or to watch Netflix. Instead of the console automatically signing out an active session, it should ask the user to choose a non-active Xbox Live ID to sign in. If the user on the second console explicitly asks to sign in with the same ID already being used, the default behavior should be that Xbox Live asks the already-active user for permission to disconnect.  If the already-active user refuses, then the second console should report this back to the second user and offer other IDs to use for sign in. My point is that Xbox Live should honor the active gamer first, and not let anyone who just turned on the second console override the experience for an active session.

7) Low cost, ultra portable console: Before the Xbox One S was announced, I was predicting that Microsoft would come out with a $199 version that would turn the tables and make the PS4 look "expensive," and make the Xbox One obtainable by a much larger audience. My guess was that they would take out all the features that were not core to the gaming experience:

• Eliminate the dedicated Kinect connector
• Eliminate the HDMI input and video overlay feature
• Eliminate the Blu-ray drive (digital downloads only)
• Fewer USB 3.0 ports (can always use an external hub for more)

If such cost reduction could drop the price to $199, I imagine this gets it to a price point that we'll see a lot more of them under Christmas trees during the holiday season. For myself, I'm keen to have a console form factor that is so small that I can easily take it with me when traveling or for LAN parties (yes, these are still a thing). The Xbox One S mostly gets there with its 40% reduction in size and elimination of the external power brick. Of course, this would all be unnecessary if Microsoft made it possible for a Windows laptop to be able boot into an Xbox mode like I suggested in a previous blog post.

8) OTA broadcast DVR: This has been a hot topic from the Windows Media Center (WMC) community, ever since Microsoft discontinued WMC with Windows 8, announced they would bring DVR to Xbox One, then put this feature on hold. The Xbox One already support USB OTA tuners, a channel guide, and live TV pause buffering. Going the final step of enabling full DVR functionality to record broadcast TV shows is logical, and would enable me to also replace my occasionally crashy Windows Media Center PC with a stable living room device. And if you project into the future, traditional broadcast TV is well on its way to being replaced with video streaming apps that support live TV (for sports and news) as well as watching shows on-demand. Given this direction of the market and the tangential benefit of a DVR to a gaming console, I totally agree with Microsoft's decision to prioritize gaming feature over this, because that is what their core user base wants.