The mail guy left a box on my porch Wednesday and I actually said "finally" out loud to an empty house, which tells you something about how this week's been going. It was the Fire TV Stick, the $39 dongle Amazon's been shipping since Monday (Prime members got it for $19 if you jumped on the preorder back in October, which I did, mostly out of spite toward my cable box).
I've been putting off doing anything about the TV situation for months. We've got a Roku in the bedroom that's fine, a Chromecast that lives behind the couch because the HDMI cable is too short and nobody's fixed it, and a cable box that costs more per month than my phone bill. So when Amazon announced this thing back in late October I figured, why not, it's cheaper than a dinner out and it can't be worse than fighting with the Chromecast every single night.
Setup is genuinely fast. Plug it in, it wants a micro-USB power cable (annoyingly it does NOT reliably run off the TV's USB port, I tried, flickered off twice during setup), connect to wifi, sign into your Amazon account, done. Maybe six minutes total, most of which was me trying to type my wifi password with a D-pad remote like it's 2003.
The remote itself is the best part honestly. It's not the voice remote you get with the full Fire TV box, just a basic clicker, but it's small and doesn't require batteries the size of a garage door opener. The interface is basically the same Fire TV OS shrunk down, which means it's still very obviously designed to sell you Amazon Instant Video first and everything else second. Netflix, Hulu Plus, and the usual suspects are all there. No HBO Go yet as far as I can tell, which is the one that actually matters to me, so I've still got the Chromecast wired up as a backup for that specific show my wife watches on Sunday nights.
Performance-wise it's noticeably snappier than the Chromecast for anything Amazon-flavored, and about even with the Roku for Netflix. I did have one weird stutter during a 1080p stream last night that I'm blaming on our router and not the stick, but I honestly can't rule out the stick.
Is it a must-buy over a Roku 3 or the regular Fire TV box? No, not really, and I wouldn't tell you it is. If you already own a smart TV or a Roku that works, this isn't urgent. But at nineteen bucks with Prime it was basically an impulse buy that happened to work out, and for the price it's hard to be mad at it.
Unrelated tangent, but staying on the "things that shipped broken-ish this month" theme: I also picked up Halo: The Master Chief Collection when it came out and I have to say the multiplayer situation has been rough. Matchmaking's been dropping games, party members getting split into different lobbies, the whole thing. Four campaigns remastered and running great, and then you try to actually play with your friend across town and it just doesn't put you in the same match. I've seen a lot of people complaining about the same thing this week so at least I know it's not just my connection. Kind of a bummer given how much they clearly put into the campaign side of it.
Anyway. Between the Fire TV Stick actually working and Halo not quite working, it's been a mixed week for stuff-that-plugs-into-my-TV. I'll probably keep the Stick in the living room permanently and demote the Chromecast to backup duty until HBO shows up on it. If you're on the fence and you've got Prime already, nineteen dollars really isn't much of a bet to lose.
Going to go see if a restart fixes the Halo matchmaking thing. It will not fix the Halo matchmaking thing.