Yousef Alnafjan

A devolutionary design

At first glance, you'd be forgiven for mistaking the Moto G for the Moto X. Like the more expensive handset, it's a subtly designed phone, defined by its softly rounded corners and elegantly curved back. Although it apes the look of the Moto X, there are a few important differences between the two phones. The 5-ounce Moto G feels much heavier than the X, and its back curves slightly too much, ruining the balance and making the G look and feel pudgy in comparison. Its side-mounted buttons poke out slightly too far and feel very plasticky and cheap.

These are the kind of details that Motorola has proven it’s capable of nailing, but at such a low price they’re apparently impossible to work around. You’re still getting an attractive handset for the price, and one that many might mistake for its more expensive cousin, but the Moto G falls short of being spectacular.

Motorola has swapped its custom X8 chip for a 1.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 400 processor and cut the RAM down from 2GB to 1GB. The cuts are clearly a trade-off required to get the price so low, but the specs still look good compared to the average $179 smartphone. Another change can be found in internal storage, which has dropped from 16GB or 32GB of storage in the Moto X down to 8GB or 16GB. The 8GB version I tested has around 5.5GB of storage for your apps, photos, and music, and there’s no microSD slot for expansion. Given the Moto G’s pretensions as a phone for the masses, this is something of an oversight. A capacious microSD can be picked up from retailers across the world for a few dollars, and a slot for expandable storage is an important feature to many.

Even for me, storage posed an issue; after syncing my (admittedly quite large) music collection over to the phone, I was left with just 500MB free. Google may want people to use its cloud services instead of local storage, but if that’s not always practical in the US, it’s a near impossibility in other countries. Thankfully, Motorola is offering the the 16GB version at just $199, just $20 more than the 8GB edition. The upgrade is a no-brainer.

LTE is probably the Moto G’s biggest missing feature, and in the US that could be a deal-breaker for many potential buyers. The Moto G is intended to be sold across the world, though. Many countries have no LTE networks at all, while others, especially in Europe, have well-developed 3G networks that can deliver good speeds compared to their US counterparts. Although some Americans might not be dissuaded by the lack of LTE connectivity, it’s perhaps the biggest tell that the US is not Motorola’s target market with this phone.

Moto Maker: Home Edition

The Moto X made headlines for its dizzying array of color options, and Motorola has done its best to bring a similar choice down to the low end of the market. Instead of offering customizable phones through its Moto Maker service, it's taking the Nokia route and offering colorful replacement shells that you can swap in for the phone’s back cover. It’s a shame, but it’s difficult to imagine Moto Maker being viable at such a low price. Unless Motorola was to set up factories in each of the 30 countries where it sells the Moto G, snap-on covers appear to be the only way to bring the personalized feel of the Moto X to the masses.

The Moto G arrived at my door decked out in all black, which just made it look fat. Luckily, I also picked up a couple of cases, one in a fetching "Lemon Lime" that's somehow both pastel and fluorescent at the same time. The other was a black flip-case that protected the display, something similar to the cases you’ve probably seen covering a Samsung Galaxy S4. Other colors available include white, blue, turquoise, red, and pink.

After a few minutes dithering, I cast aside the unmemorable black shell in favor of the citrus-inspired casing, and haven't looked back. With a splash of color, the Moto G becomes a much more likable phone, and the two-tone stylings give the illusion of a slimmer device.

Pretty they may be, but swapping covers is a chore, requiring you to wrench off the case by wedging your fingernail into the phone's Micro USB charging port and pulling. It's not likely to be something you do every day, but I haven’t had this much trouble removing a case in years.

With the cases, Motorola once again falls short of exacting standards; the black flip-cover feels coarse and unpleasant in your hands, and when closed the front portion never quite aligns with the corners of the phone. The yellowy cover, although looking more attractive than its brethren, began to creak after a couple of days. After a week of heavy use, it’s developed a cacophony of infuriating squeaks and clicks that radiate from an air gap close to the phone's rear camera. Although matte and resistant to fingerprints, the cover gets dirty very quickly, and I worry how well it’ll stand the tests of time.

The Moto G doesn’t have to contend with the type of premium devices that meet my standards, though, and compared to the (admittedly fun) clear plastic shelled Asha phones like the 503, uninspiring Firefox OS phones like the ZTE Open, and Nokia’s low-end Windows Phones, the Moto G looks truly premium, even if it doesn’t quite live up to expectations.

Motorola has taken a leap in the right direction here, bringing aspirational qualities to a new price range, but it hasn't performed a miracle. Instead, it’s boiled down the elements of great design to sell it to the masses. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Crystal clear

Although outdone by more expensive, higher-resolution displays, the Moto G's 4.5-inch 720p LCD panel is in a class of its own at this price. A bright panel with accurate colors and solid viewing angles, there's really not much more I could ask from a budget smartphone. In fact, the display is easily on par with those found on last year’s flagships, such as the HTC One X. It's certainly a huge step up from the low-resolution displays offered by the competition.

Nokia's cheap Lumia and Asha phones, Samsung's lesser Galaxy smartphones, and LG’s Optimus F range all offer WVGA (800 x 480) displays. Some Samsung phones, like the Galaxy Fame, step that down further to HVGA (480 x 320). Of course, resolution isn’t the only defining aspect of a display, but the difference between WVGA and 720p is immediately noticeable. That Motorola has managed to put this display into a phone costing so little is an achievement in itself.

Fast, fun, and out of focus

One almost cruelly overlooked feature at this price range is a phone’s camera. Images from budget phones are almost universally awful, with even camera specialists like Nokia failing to work their magic into low-end offerings. Motorola’s final cost-cutting trick can be found at the back of the phone, where the Moto X’s 10-megapixel camera is gone, replaced by a 5-megapixel unit. Given the mixed performance of the 10-megapixel shooter, the downgrade immediately gave me cause for concern.

The Moto X’s camera experience is almost fully recreated for the Moto G, omitting only the finicky gesture that activates the app from sleep. As with the Moto X, Motorola has stripped out the vast majority of the settings from its camera app. Tapping anywhere on the screen adjusts the white balance, exposure, and focus before taking a photo. It makes taking pictures feel fun and natural; unfortunately, the app yields extremely mixed results. Photos were often out of focus in all but the most perfect of lighting conditions, and, perhaps to compensate for the poor low-light performance, the flash fires off even when it’s absolutely not needed.

Swiping in from the side of the screen brings up a hemisphere of icons that lets you deactivate the flash, and, more importantly, grants you some control over focus and exposure. Activating the "Control Focus & Exposure" option puts a rectangular target on the screen that you can drag to let the Moto G know what you want in focus before you tap the screen to close the shutter and take a photo. It’s not flawless, but it’s actually very intuitive and would perhaps make more sense as the default setting.

Even with Control Focus & Exposure activated, the image quality from the Moto G is disappointing. The phone just doesn’t take good photos most of the time. It’s got a voracious desire to post-process your images to the nth degree, adding in noise and artifacting that result in some extremely bad photos. Coupled with the focusing issues, the Moto G offers up yet another disappointing low-end Android camera. It matches the competition, but nothing more.

Bang for the buck

Comparing the Moto G against more expensive handsets isn't exactly fair. Anyone upgrading to the Moto G is likely to notice a huge leap in performance. That’s true even for those with flagship phones from 2011, like the Samsung Galaxy S II or iPhone 4S, and the difference between the Moto G and any other sub-$200 handset ever is night and day. In the sub-$200 market, only Windows Phone devices like the Lumia 520 and 620 get close to the kind of experience that Motorola is offering here.

Motorola has taken a no-frills approach to software with the Moto G. There are few differences here between Motorola's and Google’s ideas of how Android should look and behave. Gone are the bells and whistles of the Moto X; you won’t find any "Ok Google Now" voice commands here, no gesture controls are offered, and the X’s extremely useful Active Notifications, which allow you to view and interact with notifications while the majority of the phone’s display is powered down, have also been cast aside.

The latter feature has probably been omitted due to hardware differences between the two phones. The Moto X has custom chips that can perform such tasks in a low-power state, and its AMOLED display only activates the pixels in use. In contrast, the Moto G has a regular Snapdragon processor and an LCD display that requires backlighting, meaning Active Notifications would impact battery life. That said, the notification LED positioned above the G’s display does a fine job of subtly informing you that it wants your attention.

Only a few of Motorola’s apps made the journey over to the G. Moto Migrate lets you transfer all of your settings, photos, videos, and music from your old Android phone with ease. It works well, but you may have to delete some content from your old device before running it, given the Moto G’s limited storage. Moto Assist intelligently learns your routine and plugs into Google Calendar to automatically set your phone to an appropriate mode. If you’re driving, it’ll allow you to engage with your phone hands-free; if your calendar says you’re in a meeting, it’ll put your phone in silent mode. It’s entirely optional but also entirely useful.

Place the Moto G alongside the Moto X and the gap in performance is almost imperceptible. Swiping through home screens is smooth, apps launch in a pinch, games run beautifully; it’s just astoundingly responsive. As the spec sheet suggests, there’s plenty of raw speed here. In fact, the Moto G offers up the kind of experience you’d expect from a $500 or $600 phone for $179. Yes, it’s not as fast as the current crop of flagship phones, and yes, scrolling in Android’s Chrome browser is as imperfect as ever, but it really blows everything else out the water.

An all-day phone

Often those looking to buy cheap Android phones currently use low-end BlackBerrys, quasi-smartphones like Nokia’s Asha range, or even an old flip phone. These customers might be used to batteries that last a week or more, something that modern smartphones just can’t match. With that in mind, it’s important that a budget device can at least keep up with the competition. Luckily, the 2,070mAh battery inside the Moto G offers more than enough power to get you through to the end of the day. It’s slightly smaller than the Moto X’s cell, but the Moto G’s processor appears to be far more frugal.

In everyday use, the Moto G is well above the average. I use my phone a lot, probably a lot more than the average buyer, but regularly got through to the end of the day with 40 percent or more left on the battery meter. With light use you should be able to squeeze two days from a single charge.

But Super Mario 3D World blows that notion away within minutes of its opening sequence. Even if the overarching design is something we've seen before, almost every individual stage is bursting with invention. As with the head-spinning Super Mario Galaxy games, Nintendo is more than happy to introduce a completely new gameplay concept only to discard it after a single level, and it's this momentum that ensures Super Mario 3D World is never predictable and never boring. You’ll ride white-water rapids atop a friendly dinosaur, learn to match your jumps to shifting platforms that appear in time with a disco-funk soundtrack, and guide Mario around a Super Mario Kart-inspired track that plays like nothing as much as an early Sonic the Hedgehog game. And that’s without spoiling some of the crazier stages in store.

Tight controls and level design are a given with Super Mario, though; the series' most successful games are the ones that best apply new, recurring elements to the existing template. On that count, too, Super Mario 3D World is a resounding success. You play the game as one of four protagonists — Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach, and Toad, harkening back to Super Mario Bros. 2 on the NES. Each has subtle differences in control: Luigi has a slightly more powerful jump than Mario, and Peach's ability to hover in midair makes her perhaps the strongest character. But the quartet can be controlled by up to four people at once, bringing the New Super Mario Bros. games' riotous multiplayer into 3D for the first time.

The new power-ups are also instant classics. Cat Mario is both the cutest and one of the most powerful abilities the Italian plumber has ever attained, letting him scamper up the side of walls, claw away attacking Goombas, and scale the top of the level-ending flagpoles for maximum points. Double Mario, meanwhile, is a mind-bending addition that sends clones to run alongside your character and mirror their every action. It’s sometimes a boon, but often sent me into paroxysms of rage as I failed to wrap my head around controlling as many as five Marios at once.

Nintendo has specifically designed certain levels to provoke that sort of reaction, and I found myself gently cursing Kyoto for bestowing this "power" upon me. Still, letting one of them die doesn’t count as a lost life, and it does feel more fair to take on the Hammer Bros. when there are two of you. The power-up is also a neat way to handle some of the levels that were designed for several characters; although Super Mario 3D World occasionally feels a little lonely for the solo player, I rarely felt that the level design suffered from Nintendo’s collaborative focus.

One thing that Super Mario 3D World is not is a showcase for the Wii U's signature feature, the tablet-style GamePad controller. While there is the occasional stage that requires you to manipulate objects with the touchscreen, these are few and far between, and for the most part Super Mario 3D World is entirely playable with a regular controller. I actually found it far more comfortable to play with the underutilized but excellent Wii U Pro Controller most of the time. You can also play directly on the GamePad without the need for a TV, though I wouldn't recommend it; the camera angles tend to be too zoomed-out to be comfortable. And relegating Super Mario 3D World to the low-resolution GamePad screen would be a shame, because it's a stunningly beautiful game.

The Wii U isn't a graphical powerhouse next to its new competitors from Sony and Microsoft, of course, but Nintendo knows how to use it. Super Mario 3D World shows Wii owners exactly what they missed out on after Nintendo chose to sidestep HD visuals back in 2006, and the Wii U's extra power turns out to provide the perfect canvas for the Mushroom Kingdom's vibrant art style.

With its colorful lighting, cute characters, and delectable textures, it's difficult to imagine how much better Super Mario 3D World could look on a more powerful machine. It runs at a smooth 60 frames per second, and though it's not as technically demanding a game as the likes of Killzone: Shadow Fall, the results are gorgeous. The brilliantly diverse soundtrack also deserves a mention; it’s not quite as majestic as Galaxy’s orchestral score, but it’s a huge improvement on the jaunty retro tunes found in most recent Mario releases.

Super Mario 3D World won’t save the Wii U alone. The 2D New Super Mario Bros. games routinely outsell their 3D counterparts, and Nintendo already blew that chance with the mediocre New Super Mario Bros. U a year ago. But alongside the equally superb The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds — which also comes out today — it’s a reminder that Nintendo is one of the best developers in the world when it wants to be, and that the Wii U will no doubt receive further titles in the future with the same unparalleled attention to detail lavished upon them. It’s taken over a year, but the Wii U finally has a must-play title to call its own — and Nintendo has two instant classics this holiday season.

Super Mario 3D World is out on the Wii U today.

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In the stack

If ever there were a triumph of function over form, it's the Xbox One. It's not attractive by really any definition: it's a big, black box about the size of an old-school VCR and with about the same amount of design flair. The One is 13.1 inches deep, 10.8 inches wide, and 3.1 inches tall, and with only an capacitive Xbox logo power button and a disk drive on its face, an untrained eye might confuse the Xbox One for your Blu-ray player or cable box.

That appears to be the point. The One isn't designed to stand out, like the sharply angled PlayStation 4; it's designed to disappear into the stack of black rectangles next to or underneath your television. The PS4's light pulses as it turns on and glows as you use it, while the One just sits in the shadows hoping you don't even notice it's there.

A glossy, piano-black plastic covers half the Xbox One, next to an angled plastic grille. The grille's not there for show: it's a vent for the device to pump out the hot air generated by its considerable internals. The One mostly runs cool and quiet thanks to the huge vent — cooler than the Xbox 360 by far — but put your hand near the console and you can tell when it's working.

There's a single recessed USB port on the left side of the console (which is clearly meant to be used horizontally, not vertically, and every design touch reinforces that), but most of the One's ports are on its back. There's a power cable, which connects to the massive power brick that unfortunately remains an Xbox mainstay. There's HDMI out (from the Xbox to your TV), HDMI in (from your cable box), two more USB ports, digital audio out, Ethernet, and the proprietary jack for the Kinect. The button for re-syncing your controllers is on the left edge, next to the optical drive. The Xbox One has quite a bit going on, but there are useful guides on the box itself to help you figure out what's what.

From a purely aesthetic perspective, there's no contest: Sony's is the better-looking console. But drawing attention isn't always the point, and indeed the Xbox One slipped right in between my cable box and my Pioneer receiver without ruining the feng shui of my living room. It's as if Microsoft is trying to sneak, unnoticed, into living rooms around the world — hoping by the time we figure out it's there, we're already hooked.

The Xbox One is meant to hide, but you can't miss the Kinect

The Kinect, on the other hand, is the bumbling best friend that trips and blows the Xbox One’s cover. It's supposed to go next to, or in front of, or on top of your TV, and it's enormous — nearly 10 inches wide, and 2.6 inches tall. It's not particularly visually arresting, just a black box with a glowing white Xbox logo and a camera lens staring you dead in the face, but there's no way you won't notice the Kinect when it starts looking at you. And it's always looking at you.

New box, new controller

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Microsoft spent $100 million developing a new controller for the Xbox One and ended up with something almost exactly like the gamepad that came with the Xbox 360 eight years ago. It's practically the same exact size in every single direction, only a half-ounce heavier, and all the buttons are in the exact same places. Even the analog sticks are the same distance from the ground.

There are a few subtle, meaningful improvements to the new gamepad, though. From the face buttons to the directional pad to the very seams in the plastic, everything looks and feels more precise than ever before. The analog sticks are now exactly 2.5 inches apart and rimmed with an extremely grippy rubber material that practically guarantees your thumbs won't slide off. There's a new cross-shaped directional pad and shoulder buttons that click instantly when you apply pressure, and better still, Microsoft has completely replaced the squeaky, cheap triggers of the Xbox 360 gamepad with a new set that's silent and buttery smooth. The new Start button — now known as "Options" — has also been moved farther away from the X button so you don't accidentally press it while you’re frantically bashing zombies or other such party fouls.

Microsoft changed a few things, but didn't change what makes the controller great

Even the controller's vibrating motors have been improved: one of the headline features of the Xbox One controller is the "impulse triggers," which are basically miniaturized, localized versions of those vibrators which can provide haptic feedback on cue. Now when you fire a gun, you can feel a distinct kick in your right hand. When your car takes a corner hard in Forza, you can feel the traction of the tires — or lack thereof — in your fingertips. It's pretty cool, though it can be jarring in the wrong places. It’s also a bit noisy.

Cosmetically, the battery box no longer sticks out the bottom of the Xbox One controller, since the compartment has been integrated into the frame. The Xbox Guide button has been moved northward into a new glossy plastic region at the top of the controller that encompasses the triggers, shoulder buttons, and a standard Micro USB port to juice up the optional rechargeable battery. Sadly, Microsoft hasn't abandoned proprietary ports altogether — the controller's new headset jack is proof of that — but that's par for the course. In almost every way imaginable, the new Xbox One gamepad is as good or better than its predecessor.

And yet, there is one difference that might ruffle a few feathers here and there. For all the company's care not to change the fundamentals, Microsoft did distort the ergonomics of the controller a tiny bit. An integrated battery box and raised crescent-shaped palmrest mean the controller’s grips aren’t as clearly defined as they were on the Xbox 360 controller, and there aren’t quite as distinct places for your fingers to grasp around back. Whether that’s a good or bad thing will probably depend on the shape of your hands, though: while I felt it didn’t fit my hands as well as the Xbox 360 gamepad, another Verge editor told me he preferred the feel of the Xbox One gamepad because the battery box no longer blocked his fingers.

Yet while the Xbox 360 controller was undeniably the gold standard for gamepads and the Xbox One gamepad is even better, the PlayStation 4's DualShock 4 gives it a run for its money this console generation. Battery life is much better on the Xbox One’s controller, which works with the Kinect and goes into a low-power state when not in use — I haven’t had to change its AAs yet — but Sony’s is more comfortable, less proprietary, and has a few more tricks up its sleeve. We have to hand it to Sony for more than catching up.

But Sony has to compete with two Microsoft controllers now: the gamepad isn’t the only input device that comes with the Xbox One.

Hello, Xbox

The Xbox One is not a particularly easy console to set up. After you hook up your TV, your cable box, your Kinect, and your wireless gamepad, you have to download a mandatory day-one update, sign into Xbox Live, and wait for the console to install a game before you can play anything at all. You'll need to invest even a little bit more time if you want to do anything else. Want to play a Blu-ray disc? Skype with a friend? Upload a video clip? There's an app for that — an app you'll need to download because there’s virtually no functionality baked in.

But the hardest part of setting up the Xbox One is simply getting used to the console's user interface. Where Sony's PlayStation 4 gives you a simple scrolling list of everything on your console — a visual paradigm that, while possibly cumbersome, immediately makes sense — the Xbox One is a smorgasbord of colored Windows 8-style tiles in seemingly arbitrary locations.

The focal point is the home screen. The largest of its nine tiles is a live preview of the latest game or app you've used, and under it you'll find the last four apps you accessed before that. To the left, there's a link to your friends list, with your profile and Gamerscore; to the right, small tiles for the disc currently in the drive, a link to a list of all your apps and games, and the Snap command. If you scroll further to the right, you’ll get to the Store screen with dedicated sections for games, apps, music, and movies, and if you go further to the left, there's a space for you to pin up to 25 pieces of your favorite content. At the very top of the screen there's a single unified notification bar that keeps track of alerts and messages, as well as the icons for each player currently signed in to the console.

Basic navigation is easy enough, once you know how it works. You go to the store, download something, and keep browsing while you wait for it to install. Once installed, you can play a game full-screen, pop right back out to the home screen with a tap of the big Xbox button on the controller, snap another app alongside it, and then jump right back into your game exactly where you left off. The Xbox keeps a running log of everything you do, so if at any point in the process you want to go back a step or five you can just keep tapping B to do so. If you get stuck, which you will at first, just tap the big Xbox button to head back home.

It's not a particularly quick interface, but it works, and Snap is extremely cool. By snapping the appropriate app alongside, you can watch a video, browse the web, or even consult a game's manual without ever leaving your game — true multitasking on a game console. With a lot of button presses and a little bit of trial and error, you can go from a relatively empty home screen and app tray to one filled with a personalized collection of recently opened and favorited programs that follow you wherever your Xbox Live account goes.

But if you use the Xbox One the way Microsoft intended, you might not be pressing buttons at all.

That’s because every Xbox One comes with Microsoft's new Kinect, a powerful camera and microphone array designed to turn you into the controller and to replace buttons and joysticks with gestures and voice commands. With the Xbox 360, Kinect had a minimal role in the interface: you could wave your hands to painstakingly swipe through pages of app icons, and you could issue voice commands to select a limited number of menu items on-screen. With the Xbox One, Kinect is everywhere.

Forget logging into your Xbox Live account: after a few sessions, Kinect will do that automatically whenever it sees you in the room. (It even excitedly greets you when it finds you.) Forget remembering where in the interface you left a game: say "Xbox, Go to Dead Rising 3" from anywhere in the operating system, anywhere at all, and you're playing as soon as the game loads. Say "Xbox Bing" and the name of a movie, and the console will find it for you and take you to a place to watch. Say "Xbox, record that" after you do something spectacular in a game, and your travails are captured for all the world to see. Browsing the web on a television is also far better with Kinect at the helm — while you can't dictate URLs with your voice, Internet Explorer will now recognize commands like "Browse to The Verge" and even let you click on links when you say them out loud. To some degree, the system will even teach you the commands itself: say "Xbox" or "Xbox Select" anywhere in the interface, and the Xbox will highlight things you can say in green text until you close the menu once more with a "Stop Listening" command.

The upshot is that you can go anywhere, do practically anything in the user interface with your voice alone — when Kinect works as it should. When Kinect works, it completely makes up for the Xbox One’s obtuse visual interface, because you don’t need to think visually anymore.

A black box

Broadly speaking, it doesn’t matter what your console looks like — it’s certainly not a reason to buy, or not buy, any given console. That’s why it’s so nice to see the care Sony took in building the PlayStation 4, a remarkably better-looking console than the PlayStation 3 — or the Xbox One, or the Xbox 360.

Most immediately obvious is just how small it is; at just over 2 inches tall, 12 inches deep and 10 inches wide, it's smaller than any version of the PS3 (even the "super slim" model) ever made, and slides into a home theater stack far more easily. The acutely angled parallelogram of a box appears to consist of four different slabs, two glossy black and two textured matte gray, stuck together with wide seams between them. It looks designed rather than simply boxed, with Sony's attention to detail clearly showing. The sharply sloped front hides two USB 3.0 ports, and makes the power and eject buttons easy to press just by feeling your way down the face of the console with your finger. I confused the two buttons easily, though, and wound up turning off the system a couple of times while trying to eject a game.

Sony didn't need to pay attention to the box itself, but it did

The console's back has a standard, if slightly spare, set of ports: HDMI, Ethernet, optical audio out, and a proprietary socket for the optional PlayStation Camera. When you're setting the PS4 up, all you need are two cables — power and HDMI — to get up and running. (It uses the same exact cables as the PS3, so if you're upgrading your Sony console all you'll need to do is drop the new box into place.) And unlike the Xbox One, there's no monstrous power brick to find room for, since everything's contained in the console itself. I was worried the integrated power supply might make the console hot and loud, but it doesn’t: I could hear the PS4 in a quiet room, and it certainly warms up under strain, but I never needed to worry about it.

It's really what's on the inside that counts, of course, and what's inside this box is impressive. The PlayStation 4 has a custom processor with eight AMD Jaguar CPU cores, and a next-gen Radeon GPU. It's based on the ubiquitous x86 architecture, which could make development and upgrades much easier going forward, but it does draw a line in the sand between the PS3 and PS4. None of your old games will work, so you might not want to remove the PS3 from your home entertainment center just yet.

The PS4 also has a 500GB hard drive — which I imagine you’ll end up upgrading at some point over the life of the console, since one game can take up 40 or 50GB — plus 8GB of memory, and a six-speed Blu-Ray drive which can load and install games faster than the PS3. It adds up to a console that’s incredibly powerful and is able to play graphically intensive games up to 1080p at 60 frames per second. But Sony missed a couple of important future-proofing opportunities. The PS4 doesn't support the 5GHz Wi-Fi spectrum, nor does it support 802.11ac Wi-Fi — both make for faster, more reliable connections, and are only going to become more standard in the future. Sony seems to assume we'll all be using Ethernet cables a decade from now, and that's a mistake.

This won't be the last PS4 design we ever see — again, the PS3 changed drastically over the years — but it's an excellent, powerful, capable start.

A better controller

Of course, you won't be spending your time with the PlayStation 4 staring at a box. You'll be interacting with the new DualShock 4 wireless controller, which is easily the best gamepad Sony has ever built.

Sony's basic controller layout hasn't changed in 16 years. Like all three DualShock models before it, there's a pair of symmetrical analog sticks in the center, four face buttons on the right, a directional pad on the left, and four triggers around back. There are a number of fancy new features here, like the colorful light bar up front, and a clickable touchpad up top. The most incredible thing Sony has done with the DualShock 4, however, is that the company has made perhaps the most comfortable gamepad I’ve ever laid hands on.

Maybe the most comfortable gamepad ever made

Where previous Sony controllers were designed to be held with fingertips, the DualShock 4's elongated, enlarged grips fit the entire length of my palms. Covered with a matte texture that manages to be grippy without feeling sticky or rough, the controller just melts into my hands without a second thought. Not only are the dual analog sticks, D-pad and face buttons perfectly spaced for your thumbs, they also feel significantly higher-quality than before. Perhaps most importantly, the DualShock 4 is finally a competent controller for first-person games thanks to raised edges on the analog sticks and incredibly comfy triggers that no longer feel like an afterthought. The controller's motion sensor has also been much improved. It's way easier to control the way my flower petals fly in Flower, such that it no longer feels like I’m wrestling with the controls.

Since the DualShock 4 now uses a Micro USB port, you can juice the controller’s rechargeable battery with a smartphone or tablet charger, or even hook it up to a PC. What's really impressive, though, is the standard 3.5mm headset jack. Not only can you use the included mono headset for voice chat, but you can also plug in any old pair of headphones and route the entire system's audio through the controller. You can play late into the night without waking anyone up, just like with the Roku 3. Not all cellphone headsets seem to work — a pair of Apple EarPods failed me — but you can also hook up a USB headset by plugging it into the console itself.

The controller's light bar, touchpad, and integrated speaker aren't used all that much in the system's launch titles, but they've definitely got potential for later down the road. The light bar lets the optional $60 PlayStation Camera track the controller in 3D space, just like a PlayStation Move. In Assassin’s Creed, you can travel in and around on the map, and in Killzone, the light bar's color gives you a visual indication of your health, starting out green and then turning yellow, orange, and finally flashing red when you're in danger of bleeding out. The best use for the speaker I’ve seen so far is in Resogun, where it blares warnings when an urgent situation requires your attention. It’s cool, but like the light bar has much greater potential.

The light bar and integrated audio will only become more fun and more useful

Held up against the Xbox 360 controller, long the gold standard for gamepads, or even what we've seen of the new Xbox One, the DualShock 4 feels as good or better on practically every front. If there's a fly in the ointment, it's that you'll need to keep it charged; I only measured 10 hours of gameplay before our brand-new gamepad bit the dust. The DualShock was immediately back in the action once I connected a Micro USB cable, but the included cable didn't reach all the way to my couch. Even with cell phone chargers, it's still harder to keep the DualShock 4 ready for action than to swap a couple of AA batteries into an Xbox controller when you inevitably run out of juice.

A blue screen

Practically everything the system does, even the built-in web browser, requires you to log in to PlayStation Network, and most of the console's highly touted features aren't available until you install a 300MB day-one update as soon as you turn on the console — all you can do is pop a disk in and play a game otherwise. Multiplayer games, voice chat, background audio, PS Vita remote play, game streaming, and even the Blu-ray player are locked down. If you don't update, the PlayStation 4 will be a very lonely place.

But even after you do update, the PS4's interface still revolves entirely around games. Where the PlayStation 3 was designed as a media hub where your pictures, music, and videos were neatly arranged in a scrolling two-column interface, Sony has stripped the vast majority of that away. While the PlayStation 4 still keeps things zen with soothing ambient music and gently rippling blue background animation, your home screen is primarily a single row of miniature hubs for your apps and games in the order you last played them.

It's kind of like Netflix: each game has its own little poster, and you hover over it for more information. Dive deeper into any title by pressing down on the analog stick and you can see what your friends have been doing in the game, which trophies you've earned, read the game manual, and get updates from the developers and the game's community. The hub also serves as a miniature storefront for downloadable content, complete with game wallpaper it plasters onto your PlayStation 4's background while you're shopping.

The hub-like app list is bookended on the left by What's New, a place where you can see a stream of everything your friends do; and Library, a different list of all your downloaded games. On top of the list is a smartphone-like notification bar: when you tap the analog stick up, you can access those notifications, along with your friends list and other social features.

At first, it seems to make sense. Just like on the PlayStation 3, you scroll left and right, up and down to accomplish things. But I had to do an inordinate amount of scrolling and clicking to do most anything. Since the main list of apps and games automatically sorts itself by recency, you can't count on anything ever being in the same place… and as the list gets longer, that just becomes more difficult. There's no way to sort or filter the list — even inside the meaninglessly distinct Library app — and if you have too many friends, the What's New hub will quickly fill up with announcements about each and every time one of them started playing a game, earned a trophy, or just about anything else.

But the real problem with the PS4's interface is that Sony hasn’t been paying attention. Sony hasn’t learned something smartphones and social networks mastered years ago: making notifications actionable.