First glimpse: Will Microsoft’s Xbox One be the one for everyone?

After four years of development, Microsoft unveiled the Xbox One entertainment console and touted it as an all-in-one solution for playing games, watching TV and doing everything in between. Microsoft wants the Xbox One to be central to your living room and packed the new Xbox with such features as the ability to change TV channels through voice commands.

“It’s really a misnomer to call this a video game console anymore,” GeekWire‘s Todd Bishop tells KIRO Radio Seattle’s Morning News. “Really it’s an entertainment machine that happens to let you play Call of Duty as well.”

Success of the new Xbox One is very important to Microsoft, but Bishop says it’s too early to tell whether the new console will be a slam dunk. “It’s certainly not guaranteed at all,” he says.

The device will go on sale later this year at a price that hasn’t been disclosed yet.

Bishop says some of the features and visuals shown in the demonstration were “a little nuts in terms of the realism,” noting a tattoo visible in a dog’s ear in a game demo.

One of the negatives though, for current Xbox owners, is that none of their Xbox 360 games will work on the new console.

“That is the one big catch for Xbox 360 users. If you buy an Xbox One you will not be able to play Xbox 360 games on it,” says Bishop, who adds this is not necessarily uncommon when you go from one game generation to another.

The specific date for release of the new console hasn’t been revealed yet More details are expected at the E3 video game conference in Los Angeles next month.

For now, the system has many impressed. To see where it will leave Microsoft in comparison to its competitors, we’ll have to wait and see.

“Microsoft has been trying to crack this market now for more than 10 years. They’re doing very well in the U.S. with the Xbox 360. It’s much more competitive on the global scale. The PS3 has been doing very well over the last couple years,” says Bishop. “The big question is whether Micsoroft can fend off Google and Apple because that’s the real competition these days as Microsoft expands more into this bigger world of entertainment.”

Here are a few more detailed notes on the new console from AP Entertainment Writer Derrik J. Lang:

DESIGN: With contrasting matte and gloss finishes, the Xbox One is the slickest video game console so far, although we don’t yet know what Sony’s upcoming PlayStation 4 will look like. (Nintendo’s Wii U came out in November and is the only one of the three new consoles already available for purchase, though sales have fallen short of the company’s forecasts.) The Xbox’s outer shell, which Microsoft calls “liquid black,” features vented flourishes and all the inputs and outputs one might need, including multiple USB ports and HDMI pass-through.

KINECT: The new version of the Xbox’s camera-based Kinect system comes with better motion and voice detection, including the ability to recognize faces, tell if you’re smiling or talking and gauge your heart rate. It appears as sexy as the Xbox console, but has been overhauled under the hood. It’s three times more sensitive and has a larger, 60-degree field of view. In a demo, the doodad’s high-definition camera easily displayed crystal-clear 1080p video and could detect up to seven people, though it lagged as more folks stood in front of it. The basic motion detection appears vastly improved, but the voice detection feature wasn’t made available to try out, adding to the list of unknowns.

PERFORMANCE: The system seems to work harmoniously together. For example, by combining the Kinect’s face detection ability with the machine’s wireless controllers, it recognized, almost magically, when users swapped controllers.

CONTROLLER: The new controller’s layout is mostly unchanged, but the bulky battery bump is gone from the back. The smoother Xbox One controller boasts a new directional pad and vibrating trigger buttons. The triggers pulsated in tandem with such imagery as a character’s heart beating and a car revving up during a demo with a prototype controller.

REQUIREMENTS: Luckily, the Xbox One won’t require a constant connection to the Internet, but there’s a possibility that some of the key features wouldn’t work as well or at all. The Kinect system is required and will come with the machine, rather than sold separately as has been the case with the Xbox 360. The Xbox One also will feature privacy settings so it doesn’t feel like the Kinect’s camera is always watching you.

LIMITATIONS: Xbox 360 games won’t work on the Xbox One because the underlying technology is different, according to Microsoft. Microsoft was vague about how the Xbox One will handle previously played games bought from other gamers, though it confirmed used games will work somehow. There had been talk that Microsoft might restrict used games on the new machine.

GAMES: What games? Despite the fact that such titles as “Call of Duty: Ghosts,” `’FIFA 14″ and “Forza Motorsport 5” were teased during Tuesday’s flashy presentation, actual games weren’t available to try out afterward. Microsoft said it plans to focus on Xbox One titles in three weeks at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the gaming industry’s annual convention in Los Angeles.
The Xbox One shows promise with a sleek shell and a new Kinect detector that seems to perform fine _ at least if you don’t try to confuse it with too many people at once. But with a lack of games and lingering questions about what it can do without an Internet connection, there are too many questions about the Xbox One, even after experiencing _ not just hearing _ what Microsoft has planned. At this point, it’s too early to say whether Microsoft or Sony is leading in the latest round of the console wars. They’ll have to duke it out at E3.

AP Entertainment Writer Derrik J. Lang contributed to this report.