I notice that some of the electronic stores in Norway has started to sell Xbox One as an "import model", stating that local services are not yet available.
I understand the part about local services, like local access to movies and tv series or whatnot.
What I'm wondering about is if buying such a model will waive access to other things in the future as well, or locking me to services from a different country?
For instance, say I ordered that Xbox One in Norway today, "import model", would I never get access to Norwegian services? Will I forever be locked to, say, UK services, or spanish services, or wherever they imported it from?
The web page mentions that in order to buy content I would need to enter the zip code and stuff like that from a country which currently officially sells Xbox One.
Will I then forever be locked to that country? Or is it a temporary issue until Xbox One actually do gets released here in Norway?
Note that Norwegian consumer laws will protect my rights in case of warranty issues, I don't have to deal with Microsoft or the source country regarding such things, the shop where I buy the item will be required to handle those things, so the only thing I'm asking about is what, if anything, will I be locking myself into?
Best Answer
First off, let me share who I am and what Xbox One I own. I live in Luxembourg, a country where Xbox Live has never been supported and most likely never will due to its small population. My Live profile is bound to the UK marketplace after I migrated it after long years of struggling with support from the German marketplace.
I bought a Day One Edition from Amazon.de, so, in essence, I own an imported Xbox One. All services on the one are tied to your profile. So if your profile is tied to the UK marketplace, you will see ads, movie recommendations, application recommendations, etc, for the UK marketplace. If you are tied to the Norwegian marketplace than the worst thing that could happen is that the feed supplying this information is not available. Should you have your profile tied to a different region, like me, than everything is just fine except for the occasional content that is region locked (although no Xbox One content is to date to my knowledge, speaking from experience with the 360) and you may need to go through a VPN to get it.
So all in all, I see no problem with importing an Xbox One. The console should work just fine and if it is officially launched in Norway, I am pretty sure it will just start loading all the content from the Norwegian marketplace if your account is tied to it. The reason why the console was not released was market focus and console saturation, not some technical issues. They simply wanted to flood their major markets with consoles.
I say, go for it. You will anyway have a warranty and right to return the goods if you purchase online, will you not? I am a bit fishy about the Norwegian law. I think that things are looking pretty good and that if you want it, you should get it.
Update Since I have posted this, I have run into some problems. It seems that payment methods are subjected to more scrutiny than before the One was released. Even purchasing on the 360 has become less forgiving. For example, using PayPal to make a purchase on a UK account while residing in Luxembourg has resulted in a payment block after three failed attempts. I had to contact the advocacy team to get it unlocked. Furthermore, they seem not very understanding of the problem and just scold you for trying to make purchases out of region.
However, using a gift card to charge money onto my account seemed to work just fine. It seems like that is the method I will have to use. Unfortunately, this might mean that I can't benefit from several services such as video streaming as they, to my knowledge, require an active payment method on your account.