The Amazon Fire TV Stick is the latest media streamer from the e-tailing giant, a downsized, slightly slower version of its flagship Fire TV, but it rings up at just ?35. Is it worth a home in your TV set, or are you better off with any of its rivals? We fired one up to find out.

The good

Just like Google's own Chromecast stick, Amazon has crafted a tiny HDMI dongle that's barely bigger than a USB thumb drive that sits in a spare port in your telly, and gives you direct access to the likes of the Amazon Prime Instant Video, Netflix, Demand 5 and more, all for the low cost of ?35. That severely undercuts many of its rivals, all while offering much more to watch than on Google's offering.

Once you've plugged it into your telly and hooked it up to either the mains or a USB port on your TV, all you have to do is connect it to your Wi-Fi and you're pretty much good to go. If you order from Amazon, you'll already find your log-in credentials pre-installed and you can start streaming right away. Baked into the tiny stick is a dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage and dual antenna (MIMO) Wi-Fi for a steady connection, and it performs well enough to get you through the menus and start watching your favourite flicks. It's a bit slower than the Fire TV, but you won't notice when you're bingewatching the latest shows.

The Fire TV Stick also shares one of the neatest features of its bigger brother, as it also learns which Amazon movies and TV episodes you want to watch next and it preloads them ready for streaming. It also comes with Amazon's X-Ray feature, which lets you dive deeper into your shows to find out who that actor or actress is, and what else they've been in.

There are plenty of apps onboard too, not just streaming video services. You'll find the likes of Spotify included for a quick music fix, plus Plex support if you run your own server at home. There are also a few games available to play, although it won't run the more graphically intensive games as the Fire TV.

The bad

You'll find practically everything you need to get started in the box, including a remote, but it's a little bit cheaper than the one found in the Fire TV. It feels a lot cheaper, and there's a lack of voice control too - although that's catered for with Amazon's own Fire TV Remote App for Fire phone, iPhone and Android phones. You can buy the full size, voice-control enabled remote separately, but you probably won't be missing out on voice control anyway. Handily, it's also a Bluetooth remote, so you don't need to keep pointing it at your telly either.

The Fire TV Stick also heavily relies on its own Amazon library - it'll push as much Instant Video content at you as it can, and it can't pre-load episodes from other services, but if you're already keen on Amazon's library, you'll be right at home. You'll also need to have a Prime subscription to really make the most of it, but if you're happy with sticking with just Netflix, it'll do you just fine. Just don?t expect to do a lot of gaming on it either, as it's not built to handle any intensive games.

The bottom line

Amazon's Fire TV Stick is an absolute bargain to get you beaming content to your TV, but you do need to be a Prime subscriber to make the most of it. While it does have a cheap feeling remote, and it's not as fast as its bigger brother, you'll hardly notice once you're deep into an Instant Video or Netflix binge, and that's all that matters, right?


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