[DuaneAA]

I received my Fire Stick today. Here are my initial impressions after a couple of hours of playing with it.

First, let me explain why I got it. I have just set up a home theater in my basement with a front projector and a ten foot screen. My blu-ray player can do streaming Netflix, but it has a slow, clunky interface. It will not access my Amazon prime account. So I was looking for something to do Amazon and also a better job with Netflix. My interest in using it for gaming apps is zero.

I plugged the Fire Stick into an open HDMI port on the back of my audio receiver, which I use to switch between my cable box, my blu-ray player, and my old HD-DVD player. Set-up was easy and it connected to my home network easily. It then updated its software, which took 5-10 minutes. While it was updating, I download the Fire Stick App into my Android phone (Samsung Galaxy Note 3).

Once it finished installing the update, the Fire Stick played a short tutorial on how to use the remote and the basics of how the menu system is set up.

I picked something from my Amazon Prime queue as an initial test and it started playing the video very quickly. From my experience, Netflix videos always start at very low resolution and it takes a minute or two for it to decide you have a fast connection and for the picture quality to reach full HD resolution. With the Fire Stick, Amazon videos seem to start at much closer to full resolution and at least the few things I tried all started playing within a couple of seconds.

Besides Amazon Prime and the other streaming sources like Netflix, Hulu Plus (which I don't have) and others, the main menu system allows access to apps separated out by categories (like free games, paid games, specialty video sources like PBS and others), Amazon Prime Music, and photos in your Amazon Cloud account.

I had loaded a number of the free Amazon Prime songs into my Kindle Fire HDX tablet when they first became available and these were all listed in the Fire Stick Menu system. I'm usually not one to just sit and listen to music, but the sound quality from the Fire Stick through the sound system in my theater was amazing and I spent a good 30 minutes just listening to music. I definitely like this feature. I will note however, I don't remember seeing any way directly within this App to add additional titles from those available from Amazon Prime music, but I might have missed it.

As far as the ability to display photos from your Amazon cloud account, I wasn't really expecting it to find any of my photos, but apparently somewhere in the past I seemed to have loaded photos from my facebook account. It had several hundred of my photos, but they were all more than a year old. The image quality was acceptable, but not spectacular. However these might have all been fairly low-res photos. I need to upload some high-res photos to my cloud account before a final impression of the quality.

The included remote:

1) To move around within the menu system it has a ring for up/down/left/right and then a central button to select. This ring on my remote is far too sensitive. It seemed like almost half the times I was trying to move one space in any direction, it would read my press as a double-tap and move two spaces. Annoying.

2) I managed to crash the remote within the first hour to the point where I had to pull the power cord out of the fire stick to get it to reset the remote. I was in the Netflix app when it happened. I assume I am like everyone else where I seem to spend more time scrolling through the queues looking for something to watch than I spend actually watching anything. In this case, I was scrolling slowly through my personal queue looking at the much improved graphics. I was probably 80 items into 180 total when I pressed the left button on the remote and it acted like got stuck down and the titles went scrolling across the screen in a fast, endless stream. After repeatedly hitting the home button on the remote, it stopped the scrolling, but after that the remote was effectively dead until I rebooted the Fire Stick. (Note: The app in my phone continued to work fine even when the included remote wasn't working.)

So, two issues so far with the remote (keys that are too sensitive and it froze while scrolling in the Netflix app), but at this point neither feels like a deal breaker on a $20 device.

Android Phone App:

This app has the same basic functionality as the included remote with the additional benefits of A) voice inputs, and B) a much better keyboard for data entry than the one possible with the remote. I only tried the voice search once looking for 'Doctor Who' and it had no trouble understanding me and returning the correct list of items.

The basic buttons from the included remote (home, back, play/pause, fastfwd and reverse) are the same in the phone app. Where they have greatly diverged is the ring for up/down/left/right and the center select button have been replaced with what looks like a trackpad from a laptop. I think I would have preferred a set of buttons on the screen like is on the included remote rather than this implementation. The biggest problem is that it is way too sensitive. On my phone the trackpad is approx 2.5" by 2.5" yet moving my finger only a fraction of an inch causes the display to scroll many steps and it is hard to get it to scroll only one item at a time. I can't find any option within the app to allow you adjust the sensitivity of the trackpad. Hopefully, they will provide the ability to adjust the sensitivity in a future update. Even better, it would be nice if they would include the option to replace the trackpad with a set of buttons more like those on the included remote.

Kindle Fire HDX tablet:

There doesn't seem to be an app in the Amazon App Store to use this tablet as a remote instead of using your phone. However even without an app, it does have some limited built-in functionality. It does know what show you are playing on the Fire Stick and can pause/play the fire stick. It also will allow you to switch the video stream between the fire stick and the kindle tablet. The x-ray feature also works allowing you to display IMDB-type data about the actors/characters on your tablet for what is streaming on the Fire Stick.

Conclusion:

It seems to have several areas that could use some improvements, but I think I am happy with what I got for my $20.

Duane