Amazon Fire TV - A Quick Look

Written by Michael Larabel in Peripherals on 5 April 2014 at 03:00 PM EDT. Page 3 of 3. 16 Comments.

Compared to using a Chromecast, the Fire TV was much easier to use and control with its remote control, the quality was much better with streaming in HD than SD, and all-around a very friendly experience.

As a means of streaming Amazon videos and costing only $99 USD, the Fire TV works excellent. However, other early reviewers of the Fire TV have been quick to criticize the device for poor integration with other apps on the system, etc. Again, this is just my quick review and mostly being interested in the Amazon Instant Video integration. I just frequently use Amazon Instanrt Videos, particularly the free Prime videos, when working late at night in the office, but don't have any other streaming service to worry about.

At $99 USD the device isn't a bad deal assuming you do a lot of video streaming from Amazon or Netflix. The voice control from the remote control was nice and certainly worked well. The hardware specs on the system with being powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC were great. If you play a lot of Amazon Instant Videos, the device is certainly worth exploring.

It will be interesting to see if the device is cracked in the days ahead to run a full Android or Linux experience, but regardless this is a very nice TV streaming device from Android for $99. You can find the device for sale at Amazon.com.

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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.