Amazon Fire TV Stick With Alexa Voice Remote

PROS

Inexpensive. Comes with a voice remote. Voice search and Amazon Alexa are very useful. Fast performance.

• CONS

Missing some notable streaming services.

• BOTTOM LINE

Amazon's new Fire TV Stick is faster and less expensive than ever, and comes with an Alexa-enabled voice remote out of the box, making it the best budget-friendly media streamer you can buy.

Amazon launched the Fire TV Stick two years ago, offering a microphone-equipped remote as an optional accessory or as part of a premium $60 bundle. Its latest media streamer—and its only one available in "stick" form—comes with a remote out of the box that gives you access to voice search and Amazon's Alexa voice assistant. It also features an upgraded quad-core processor, and perhaps most impressive of all is available for just $39.99. Despite a few omissions in streaming apps, the Fire TV Stick With Alexa Voice Remote easily offers enough in the way of features and value to make it our new Editors' Choice for budget media streamers.

Design

The new Fire TV Stick$39.99 at Amazon is just a hair wider than the previous model, at 3.4 by 1.1 by 0.5 inches (HWD), but otherwise looks identical. It's a plain black plastic rectangle with an HDMI plug on one end and a micro USB port on one side. As a stick intended to plug into the back of your television, it doesn't need to look impressive or have any real controls or display.

The included voice remote appears to be the exact same remote that was available for the previous stick. It's a 5.9-inch flat black plastic wand with a glossy circle near the top that serves as a navigation pad, with a clickable Confirm button in the center. A Microphone button sits above the pad, with a pinhole microphone above that for talking into. Menu and playback controls sit below the navigation pad.

App and Accessories

You can use the Amazon Fire TV Remote app for Android and iOS if you prefer to control the Fire TV Stick with your smartphone or tablet. It's much simpler than the remote app used with Roku devices, mostly providing a touchpad for menu navigation, a handful of playback controls, a voice search function with your device's microphone, and (most useful if you need to enter login information) an onscreen keyboard. It doesn't offer private listening like the Roku app does, which streams audio through your smartphone or tablet so you can listen to what you're watching with a set of headphones plugged into it. Since the Fire TV Stick supports Bluetooth, however, you can simply pair a set of Bluetooth headphones directly with the stick for a similar function.

Besides the voice remote, the Fire TV Stick comes with a short HDMI extender cable (handy if the HDMI ports on your television are recessed), a micro USB cable, a USB power adapter, and a pair of AAA batteries for the remote. It's everything you need to start streaming media, short of the TV itself.

Fire TV OS

Amazon uses a heavily modified version of Android in the new Fire TV Stick, the same as you'll find in all other Fire TV devices. The interface is currently identical across the devices, with a prominent navigation bar on the left side of the screen and both apps and content organized categorically into rows that expand to fill the screen when you select them. That will change with an upcoming software update that will make the Fire TV interface look and act more in line with Android TV devices like the Nvidia Shield Android TV and Sony's connected televisions. We'll update this review with a detailed look at the new interface when it rolls out later this year.

Like other Fire TV devices, the Fire TV Stick uses a limited version of Amazon's app store rather than Google Play for all of its apps and services. Most major streaming services are available, including (of course) Amazon, HBO NOW, Hulu, Netflix, Sling, and YouTube. It's missing a few prominent services, though, like Crunchyroll, Google Play, Spotify, and Vudu, all of which are available on Roku.

As an Amazon product, Amazon Prime users get a lot of benefits baked into the Fire TV Stick, even before installing any apps. Videos on Amazon can be accessed directly from the stick's interface, so you can just jump into anything you want to watch (if it's on Prime). While Spotify isn't available, you can access Amazon Music Unlimited (which is $9.99 for a monthly subscription, or $7.99 with Prime) to stream plenty of music through your television and any connected speakers. You can also access a limited amount of free music through Prime.

Since it's still basically an Android device there are a few esoteric techniques for sideloading your own .apk files and installing any app you want (to varying success based on integration with the remote control and other factors). I installed Crunchyroll without a problem, but when I launched the app it appeared as a portrait-format smartphone app and didn't display an onscreen cursor, making it unusable. It's also a clunky solution we wouldn't recommend for anyone who isn't confident in their technical abilities and knows their way around a command line, but it does offer some freedom not available with a Roku or the Apple TV$149.99 at Apple Store.

Voice Search and Performance

Any shortcomings in the Fire TV app store are made up for by the powerful voice assistant and search functions. By holding the Microphone button down on the remote, you can search for movies, shows, and apps simply by speaking into it.

Alexa can search based on show and movie titles, actor and director names, and broad genres and themes (though the more vague your requests are, the less reliable the results will be). The voice search feature spans across 90 different apps and services including Netflix and Hulu, and the Fire TV Stick keeps track of any subscriptions you might have and front-loads search results to highlight content available on those services. Search results still lean toward Amazon's own on-demand and instant video libraries when they're available, but it's a handy and comprehensive way to look for anything you might want to watch.

Besides voice search, you can get useful information and even have the Fire TV Stick perform certain tasks with your voice thanks to Amazon Alexa integration (the same voice assistant used in the Amazon Echo$179.99 at Amazon and Echo Dot$49.99 at Amazon), which really adds a lot of convenience that the voice search functionality on Roku devices doesn't offer. You can check the weather, find out sports scores, bring up Wikipedia information, and even add items to your shopping list. You can also add skills to Alexa for additional features, like ordering a pizza through Domino's, or guiding you through a Johnnie Walker whiskey tasting. Third-party skills vary wildly in functionality and usefulness, but they really add to what you can do with the Fire TV Stick.

Voice recognition is excellent. Even with my voice sounding hoarse from a cold, the Fire TV Stick understood all of my requests. It brought up search results for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Gundam, and Voltron with no issue, gave me a weather forecast for the coming week, and told me when the upcoming presidential debate would be. It's impressively accurate and responsive for a $40 streaming device.

Performance is aided in part by a new quad-core processor that significantly speeds things up over the previous model. Navigating menus isn't quite as fast as it is with the 4K-capable Fire TV box$89.99 at Amazon, and the stick can only output up to 1080p video, but it's an appreciable upgrade (with a much more reasonable price than the Fire TV). I had no issue flipping between different apps and quickly loading movies and shows.

Like all media streamers, especially ones that only use Wi-Fi, video quality depends on the speed and signal strength of your network.

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