The Amazon Fire TV Stick is one of the best HDMI dongles on the market. It has a great design, is easy to use, and offers great value. The Amazon Fire TV Stick is perfect for anyone who wants an easy way to watch their favorite streaming content. It has a sleek design and comes with a variety of features that make it an excellent choice for those who want the best experience possible. One of the most important features of the Amazon Fire TV Stick is its ability to work with any streaming service. This means that you can easily access all your favorite shows and movies without having to worry about which service you have installed on your device. The Amazon Fire TV Stick also has a great range of features that make it perfect for gaming. This includes support for both PS4 and Xbox One games, as well as voice control for games like Minecraft and Fortnite.
The unit has a slim profile, scarcely longer than the Chromecast and about the same size as the Roku Streaming Stick. Like its competitors you plug it directly into your HDMI port and power it with a micro USB cable attached to a properly powered USB port on your media center or television (or the included power adapter if you want always on availability). It has no external switches or LED indicators.
Although the Fire TV Stick doesn’t have the same beefy specs as the larger Fire TV it’s no slouch in the hardware department. It sports 8GB of onboard flash storage (4 times more than the Chromecast and 32 times more than the Roku Stick), a dual-core processor (the Chromecast and Roku Stick have a single core), 1GB of RAM (twice the Chromecast and Roku Stick), and a dual band MIMO antenna (the Chromecast has a single band antenna but the Roku Stick also has a MIMO antenna).
How Do I Set It Up?
After picking your Wi-Fi network and keying in your credentials you’ll get treated to a video by the same cartoon guide, Steve, that appears on the first startup of the Fire TV.
User friendliness is definitely high on the Fire Stick TV (as it has been on the prior Fire TV and the Fire tablets). The video is brief but packs in the major features and what to do with the device in a minute or two.
Other than entering your account information and Wi-Fi credentials there’s no other setup to speak off (although we’ll highlight a helper app in a moment that you might want to check out).
User Interface
Hardware and Performance
Although the Fire TV Stick doesn’t have the same beefy quad-core processor that the Fire TV does (nor does it have the array of external ports) we were still pleasantly surprised at how powerful it is. We had no issues with menu lag, the videos played smoothly and promptly, and the device handled lightweight Android games without any problem.
In fact outside of running more resource intensive Android applications or games on the small stick, we’re hard pressed to think of a situation where the extra processing power of the Fire TV would become a necessity.
As far as menu speed, video loading, video playback, and light gaming is concerned the two devices are virtually indistinguishable. While we did notice very slight hesitation on some menu and thumbnail loading it was extremely slight and we’d hardly call it laggy or sluggish (it just wasn’t as absolutely silky smooth as it would be on the much more powerful Fire TV unit).
Specialty Features
Like the Fire TV there are a handful of specialty features that help the Fire TV Stick stand out from the crowd. As you’d imagine, however, the feature set and the reach of those features are fairly diminished on the Fire TV Stick compared to the more expensive Fire TV.
Voice Search (With a Catch)
Gaming
We had really mixed opinions on the Fire Stick TV’s gaming abilities. On the one hand, as we noted in our Fire TV review, we have a dim view of mobile-gaming-on-the-TV in general. But on the other hand, the Fire TV Stick offers more gaming options than pretty much every other HDMI dongle combined. So while we have high expectations for a device like the Fire TV that costs $99 and touts itself has a legitimate gaming device, we have such low expectations for a device like an HDMI dongle that we were actually pleasantly surprised with the fact that it could actually play lightweight Android games and even supported Bluetooth controller pairing.
While we don’t see mobile gaming via HDMI-dongle really taking off any time soon (and the gaming options on the Fire TV Stick are even more limited than on the Fire TV), very simple Android games and pass-and-play party games definitely have a place in the living room if you’re interested in low-stakes gaming without a lot of emphasis on depth or graphics.
