Amazon’s Fire TV

Amazon has diversified before, and now they are going after your living room – with . It is a streaming player. It can be used to stream video content and play games. With fierce competition, such Apple TV and Roku 3, let’s see what the Fire TV has to offer.

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Streaming With Fire TV

The Fire Box Comes with a simplistic remote, and comes equipped with HDMI, Optical Audio, Ethernet, and USB ports. While streaming, you could use the ‘Voice Search’ feature, by holding down the microphone button on the remote and saying out the name of the movie, actor, or TV show. This search mostly brings you ‘Amazon Instant Content’. A new feature, ASAP, cuts down on loading time when streaming ‘Amazon Instant Content’.

Apps On Fire TV

The emphasis on ‘Amazon Instant Content’ carries over to the user interface. On the screen layout, the closest options are from ‘Amazon Instant content’ and you cannot customize the layout to change this arrangement. Its best to give up and only scroll through ‘Amazon Instant Content’, as other apps are out of reach. While having apps like Netflix, Youtube, Pandora, and Hulu Plus, in the third party apps section, the Fire TV lacks a few important apps, such as HBO Go, Spotify, Vudu, and PBS.

Games On Fire TV

There is a good selection of games to choose from, and the graphics are decent for a stream player worth 99 bucks. The Fire TV works with Amazon’s Fire Game Controller, which is sold separately for 40 bucks. Only issue here is that the storage space is 5.3 GB – with upcoming games being over 1 GB each, you will run out of space.