Xbox One to hit first 13 markets on November 22

Microsoft has finally announced the launch date for the Xbox One. The next-gen console will be hitting stores in 13 markets on November 22. The first markets to get the console will be Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Spain, UK and USA. According to Microsoft, the console will be released in more markets in 2014.

For the sake of comparison, this means that in the US, the Xbox One will be hitting stores a week after Sony’s PlayStation 4. However, for a lot of Europe, the Xbox One will be there before the PlayStation 4 owing to the latter’s November 29 release date in the continent.

Finally a release date

According to a recent Reuters report, the Xbox One has been quite popular. Microsoft has revealed that markets have run out of Xbox Ones for pre-orders. “We have more pre-orders than any other Xbox console releases in history,” Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi said, adding that the company would “enable some incremental, additional units for the day one release.”

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Earlier, Mehdi had revealed that the Xbox One had gone into full-blown manufacturing and that its CPU is getting a 150 MHz boost in clock speed. This pushes the console’s clock speed up from 1.6 GHz to 1.75 GHz.

Earlier, Xbox’s Marc Whitten had revealed that the console’s GPU would be getting a similar boost in power. According to Whitten, the GPU of the console runs at 853 MHz, up from the earlier 800 MHz.

India is expected to get the Xbox One some time in the second half of 2014.