The box showed up on the porch Wednesday and I let it sit on the counter until Friday night because that's just how my week went. Amazon's Fire TV Stick, $39, no tax on my order because Amazon still doesn't collect here (that won't last, I know). I'd been curious about it since it started shipping on the 19th, mostly because I already have a Chromecast plugged into the same TV and I wanted to see if there was any real reason to own both.
Short version: there kind of is, and it's the remote.
That sounds dumb to say out loud, a $39 verdict resting on a plastic wand with six buttons on it, but hear me out. The Chromecast is great until you hand the TV over to someone who doesn't have the app installed on their phone, or whose phone died, or who just wants to press a button and have Hulu open without unlocking a screen first. My mother-in-law was over two weekends ago and completely could not figure out how to cast anything, and I ended up doing it for her from my phone across the room like some kind of AV butler. That's not a huge complaint about Chromecast as a $35 gadget, it does what it does well, but it assumes everyone in the room has a smartphone habit built around casting. Not everyone does. The Fire Stick just hands you a remote and says go.
Setup took maybe twelve minutes, most of which was me hunting for a spare USB power adapter because the outlet situation behind my TV is a disaster of extension cords and the included adapter cable wasn't quite long enough to reach anything sane. Once it's powered and paired to wifi it walks you through signing into your Amazon account, and if you already buy stuff on Amazon (I do, too much) it's genuinely fast. The remote pairs over Bluetooth rather than needing line of sight, which I only noticed because I could still change the volume with the stick sitting behind the TV, out of view, which is a small thing that made me unreasonably happy.
The interface itself is fine. Rows of tiles, your recent stuff up top, a search function that's mediocre with the included remote because you're clicking through an on-screen keyboard letter by letter like it's 2006. There's no voice search built into this remote, that's apparently coming to a different version down the line, so if you want to find something you're either typing it out or using the Fire TV phone app to search from your phone, which sort of undercuts the whole "no phone required" pitch I was just making. I noticed this within about ten minutes of using it and made a face at my wife that she didn't ask about.
App selection is what you'd expect for something built by a retailer that also sells its own video service. Amazon Instant Video is front and center, obviously, but Netflix and Hulu Plus are both there and work exactly the way you'd expect, no weird lag, no buffering wheel that hangs around longer than it should on my connection. I haven't gone looking for everything that's missing yet. Give it a few months and I assume the gaps get filled in the way they always do with these things.
Is it better than a Roku? I don't actually know, I haven't owned one since the very early box model years ago, the one that felt like a science project. Compared to that, sure, everything now looks like magic. Compared to the Chromecast sitting one HDMI port over, it's not a leap forward so much as a different bet on who's holding the remote at 9pm on a Tuesday.
Also, unrelated, but it's been a rough week in tech news generally if you've been anywhere near a headline the last few days — I'm not going to rehash it, half the internet already has a post up about a tech exec saying something at a dinner he probably wishes he hadn't. Not what I'm here to write about tonight.
Anyway. The remote's already missing between the couch cushions, found it twice tonight, and the box it came in is sitting by the door waiting for recycling day, which around here is not until Tuesday, so it'll be there a while.