Amazon launched a new device yesterday evening called the Amazon Fire TV which, in my eyes, is basically a glorified set-top box with a couple of neat features bundled in. But in a market already crowded with Chromecasts, Apple TVs and Rokus, will the Fire TV be able to make a mark for itself?
The Voice Search on the Fire TV
Yes, yes it is. Well at least Amazon says so. According to them the Fire TV “is a tiny box you connect to your HDTV. It’s the easiest way to enjoy Netflix, Prime Instant Video, Hulu Plus, low-cost movie rentals, and much more.” Judging by what we have seen it does indeed seen far more elegant to use than, say, a Roku or a Chromecast thanks to its incredibly accurate voice search feature. You just press and hold the button at the top of the remote, say the name of the show you are interested in watching and voila the results come up instantly. There’s no need to fiddle around with the directional buttons on a remote to use an on-screen keyboard. On the downside though, the search only searches across Amazon’s library of titles.
Another feature which caught our eye was its ASAP service which pre-loads movies that you may be interested in watching. Say you watch the first 3 episodes of “House of Cards”. It then stands to reason that you’ll be watching a couple of episodes more as well. The Fire TV takes the liberty of caching the next few episodes from the Internet so that you can instantly start watching whenever you want without waiting for the stream to buffer.
Specs wise the Fire TV packs a punch with 2 GB of RAM, Adreno 320 GPU and a Qualcomm Krait 300 quad-core processor clocked at 1.7 GHz meaning that browsing around the UI is a snap without any hiccups or lags. These specs also makes it possible to play some games on the Fire TV if you so wish. Amazon maintains that the Fire TV is NOT a gaming console but its does the trick for some casual gaming. The library, while not huge, is packed with quality games such as Sev Zero,Asphalt 8: Airborne, Dead Trigger 2 etc which run without a hiccup thanks to the internals of the Fire TV.
My Take:-
Can it live up to the hype?
Priced at $99, the Fire TV does offer a lot for the price. However a device is only a winner of the public accepts it as one and in a market teeming with other similar devices, Amazon’s late entrant might not be able to gather the momentum that it needs to in order to become successful. I guess only time will tell.
TatkaTech 