Gadgets: Game consoles fight over a dubious prize

A philosophical war is being waged in the world of video game consoles.

One view is represented by Microsoft's Xbox One: the console as home media hub, combining television, movie watching, video streaming, games and computerlike features such as Skype on one device.

This is an impressive feat, but it's not free. To access streaming media, apps or even the channel guide, you must pay for a $60-per-year Xbox Live Gold account, on top of your Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime or any other service subscription fee.

Once you're connected, you navigate through menus using the Xbox controller or the console's other big innovation: voice and gestures in the form of Kinect, the voice and motion-sensing camera.

Unfortunately, despite the gee-whiz appeal of the voice features, the verbal commands don't always work. Plus, it's inefficient to say "page down" repeatedly, compared with quietly pressing a button.

A second view comes from Sony, whose PlayStation 4 is for playing video games first, for streaming video and watching DVDs second, and for little else.

The PlayStation is highly social. You can share game screenshots on Facebook or Twitter, and you can even record and share short video clips, with basic editing built in. The killer feature is the ability to broadcast your gameplay live to Ustream.tv or to Twitch.tv, a hugely popular game streaming website where people spend hours watching other people play video games.

The real question, though, is whether the idea of a console itself is out of date.

Mobile gaming on tablets and phones can be as immersive and fun, and obviously more portable. A console for streaming video is redundant when most new TVs have Internet streaming and apps built in, not to mention Internet-connected Blu-ray players, streaming devices like Roku and Apple TV, or even Google's $35 Chromecast.

So, while the PlayStation may be the better console of the two, in the end it may be a victory of one dinosaur over another.

NEW YORK TIMES