Waking up on Christmas morning and unwrapping an Xbox One will usually be enough for most of us, but if being the same as everyone else just doesn't cut it for you, then maybe you could ask Kris Kringle for the 24-karat gold plated Xbox One that is currently available at Harrods in London.
Concepts are a great way to envision what upcoming products might look like, while at the same time, tipping off the developing companies to what the user base would appreciate having. Just a couple of days back, we tipped our readers off to rumors pertaining to Windows 8.2, and what “Threshold” might mean for the end user. Taking cues from the same rumor base and building on it further, comes Andrew Ambrosino’s Windows 8.2 (or Windows 9) design concept, which basically highlights what could be improved with the next generation of Windows from the Redmond giant.
Sony and Microsoft have both attempted to continue the console roller-coaster by issuing separate statements about their hardware. The individual statements both take the opportunity to reflect on the sales and successes of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One during the first calendar month of availability. As you might expect, neither company is initially prepared to accept that they are playing catch-up with the other, and as a result have opted to put their own individual slant on November's sales figures with the intention of claiming an early victory.
Microsoft's Windows Phone has failed to capture the hearts and minds of the great unwashed smartphone buying masses, even if it has managed to carve out a little corner of the sales pie chart to call its own. Unfortunately for Microsoft though, that little bit of market share isn't going to cut the mustard moving forward, especially with the acquisition of Nokia expected to move the mobile division of the Redmond firm onto the next step.
The Xbox One might only have been out for a couple of weeks, but it was always inevitable that a system update would not be too far behind. With the console now in the hands of millions of users, the process of refining the experience can finally commence, and as per a blog post by Major Nelson, there are plenty of tweaks and alterations with the Xbox One's inaugural system update.
The renewed console war has officially begun, with both the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One having released across several major markets. Having already heard that Sony managed 2.1 million consoles sold in just a couple of weeks from its launch in November to the end of the month, figures shared by Major Nelson suggest that Microsoft is right on its tail.
When Windows 8 was just starting to make waves, one of the things that caught many people off guard was the fact that the Start button was gone. Not hidden, not moved, but removed completely. With Windows 8's move to Metro as an app launcher, there was deemed to be no need for a Start button. The Internet, nay the world disagreed.
The Halo franchise has been an integral part of the Xbox's success hitherto, and with the Xbox One having just entered the scene, Larry Hryb, better know as Major Nelson, has just revealed the release date of Halo: Spartan Assault on the console.
The recent wave of data breaches on a number of popular sites and Web service providers should definitely be a cause for concern to most users. Malicious attacks on the likes of Yahoo!, Facebook and Adobe should act as a catalyst for us to review our current account setup and make changes accordingly to improve the strength of passwords, even if your data wasn't amongst the batch that was compromised in any of the attacks. Microsoft Research is well aware that password strength is one of the most vital components in combating such breaches, and as such has created the Telephathwords tool to try and guess the next character of a password based on a large database and complex query patterns.
Microsoft's decision to not offer any kind of backwards compatibility with the Xbox One undoubtedly ruffled a few feathers. The decision is entirely understandable from a business perspective, but it has definitely left a bitter taste in the mouths of many users who will go to great lengths to try and "enable" compatibility with older Xbox 360 games, even if it means putting their console at risk. Larry Hryb - better known as Major Nelson to most - has taken to his official Twitter timeline to warn Xbox One users of the dangers involved in enabling the built-in developer mode on the console in the hope of playing those old games.
