The Fire TV Stick runs Fire OS 7 (Android 9) and arguably one of the cheapest streamers supporting voice search. Here’s our honest review after a month of usage.
Design and Build
Performance
Whatever issues you might have with the Fire TV stick’s appearance, once you plug it in at the back of your TV, it’s out of sight, out of mind. From this point onwards, it’s the brains and not the looks that attract your average user. On paper, the Fire TV stick packs some quiet ammo. It sports a MediaTek MT8695D 1.7 GHz quad-core processor, and IMG GE8300 GPU and 1GB DDR4 RAM. Other specs include 1080p at 60fps with HDR/HDR+10/HLG compatibility. and Dolby Atmos sound available on select Prime Video, Netflix, and Disney+ titles and compatible hardware. Connectivity is via Bluetooth 5.0 and, 2.4 GHz and 5.0 GHz dual band WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac reception for a quality connection. Despite its underwhelming 1GB RAM, the Fire TV Stick boots up in 35.83 seconds as per our test. This is faster than even the Chromecast with Google TV despite having more RAM. The secret is that DDR4 RAM is roughly 3X faster than the DDR3 RAM the Chromecast uses. Given that the dongle’s main purpose is to browse and stream content, it’s got more than enough firepower to ensure a smooth experience. You will notice that other than navigaton, it takes a second or two between fiddling with your remote and seeing any action on the Fire TV Stick. It’s not really a deal breaker for me, because the price more than makes up for it.
Interface & Content
As I am not in the US, my Fire TV Sticks looks a tad different from the motherland. All I get is Home, Find, and Live along with smaller tiles to popular subscriptions. The Fire TV Stick supports most major streaming apps you can think of. If all that is a little bit too overwhelming, a better place to go is the Find tab. Here you can search for a particular movie, peruse through your library or under Free labels (Free with Ads on IMDb). Further curation is under Movies, TV Shows, Kids and Family, Sports, Action Movies and Horror Movies among others. The Fire TV Stick attempts to curate content from other subscriptions (e.g. Netflix, HBO Max, e.t.c) which is a nice touch. For a more traditional setup, Live TV does the trick. I liked the fact that I could watch Live TV with minimal hustle. It gives Fire TV Stick a freshness to it, in the face of all the canned content which I have to dish out for myself.
Alexa Voice Remote
Other than the Alexa button, the other buttons I use the most comprise the power button, Home button, volume buttons, and especially the D-pad. The rest are simply bells and whistles.
Casting
Casting is dependent on apps that support the Fire TV Stick’s brand of casting. After installing apps like Spotify, Netflix and YouTube and VLC on your Fire TV Stick, you should be able to cast to them. I also usually mirror my Android and Windows PC screen to the streaming stick using Miracast. Unfortunately, that didn’t seem to work with my Fire TV stick. Well, wireless display also didn’t work for the Chromecast with Google TV, although it does with the Mi Box and the Roku Stick.
What I didn’t like
This last one is quite petty, but nevertheless hear me out. I found the screen saver refresh time to be so short. A wallpaper was changing every minute or so. I found myself distracted from my work every time by the shifting scenery, until I fiddled with the settings to slow it down.
Price and where to buy
