Top positive review
1 people found this helpful
Reliable with great video/sound.
By citadel1980 on Reviewed in the United States on October 1, 2020
Please hit the HELPFUL button if this provided you with information that helped your buying decision. Cliff’s Notes: If you watch/listen mostly to Prime content, you will love this. And you can pay for some subscription-based services to customize what you want to watch. Reliable with great video/sound. I wanted to cut the cord from my TV provider and decided to go with Amazon’s Fire products. The Amazon 4K Fire TV is an upgrade to the Fire TV Stick. I have a newer Firestick and bought the 4K Fire TV after that because I wanted to be able to add apps outside the Amazon store. Going into developer mode and turning on those permissions allowed me to add some apps I wanted that were not in Amazon’s store easily and with no installation issues. To ensure you get the best picture for your TV resolution, you should go into the settings and ensure that the Auto-detect setting is set. This way you can be sure it is providing 1080, 2k or 4k, depending on your TV specs. I have 200 mbps FIOS internet through an AC band router using the 5 Ghz band and it streams effortlessly with no slowdown, glitches, or delays. The interface is well designed, but be aware that you might need to scroll down on some screens to get something you want outside of the Prime offerings, as they list things with Amazon services first. Amazon sends this to you with your account already set-up…great customer experience. You can also set up a password for purchases, in case you have children or others that might inadvertently buy new content. Of course, Prime services are preloaded, but you might need to add some items like Netflix, which is very easy using their setup mode. The Alexa integration on the voice activated remote is great. You can ask Alexa to show you action movies, the weather, etc. I found the response to be fast and pretty accurate, although it might take a little learning how to best ask Alexa for things to get the best responses. Another probably not used as much item is the Bluetooth…with that, I have connected a Bluetooth keyboard that REALLY is a time saver when you have to put in passwords, or put in a URL address if you are adding something outside the Amazon store. Bluetooth can be used for headphones also, if you want to watch/listen while not disturbing others. Negatives (not deal breakers): Amazon should allow more competitor apps…after all, if this is for entertainment and people use different apps/services, they should have it available. You can add them yourself, but that should not be necessary. This is putting Amazon OVER the customer needs. Also, not having an ethernet port might not be criminal, but it is again because Amazon wants you to BUY another device, rather than provide what should be in the box. Greed like that is inexcusable. The HDMI cable should be longer…I had to attach an extender to mine to get it where I wanted since my audio and video components are on wall shelving. There are not as many free apps as you might expect, so it would be nice to have a filter for just free apps.
Top critical review
5 people found this helpful
A rare miss for Amazon
By Eddiela on Reviewed in the United States on December 5, 2017
Somehow the product design process at Amazon jumped the rails on this device. Amazon had already figured out there were two markets for streaming devices; a low end and a higher end. The low end where users don't really care about the total number of features and the best picture quality, they just care about price. The FireTV Stick is perfect for these customers. The higher end customer wants more features, more horsepower to push high resolution video, and is willing to pay a little more for it. For years the FireTV Gen1 and 2 was a great choice for this group. I personally own 3 of these devices and they have been awesome. For some unknown reason Amazon decided to design and release this God-forsaken low end/high end hermaphrodite of a device that will make nobody happy. For the low end customer, there is no reason to spend more for a device this is only a marginal improvement over the FireTV Stick. For high end customer, the problems with this device are legion. I'll try to stick to the highlights here. DOA So the unit I ordered was dead on arrival. This in and of itself is not enough to earn a one star review. These things happen. One DOA unit out of presumable hundreds of thousands of units does not make for a bad product. Normally I would have simply returned it for a replacement. Unfortunately I had ordered this unit without even reading any customer reviews beforehand. Since my previous FireTVs had worked so well, I just assumed that Amazon would not screw this up. That was my mistake. After taking a look at the device first hand and reading reviews left by others, I quickly decided that I had to skip out on the FireTV until Amazon corrects this mistake and releases a viable product. Quality of build This is a cheaply made device. The number one complaint I have is the integrated HDMI (sort of) cable. SUCH as bad design decision. Some of the promotional photos even show the device HANGING from the cable while connected to a television. So what are you aiming for here Amazon? Do want the HDMI port on our TVs to break so we need to buy a new TV from you? Or do you want the solider points on the FireTV to fail so we need to buy another FireTV? Removal of connections This could also be mentioned under the quality of build gripe. The FireTV pendant removed basically every connection the Gen2 device had. No usable USB (for flash drives, keyboards, mice, etc), no SDCard slot for storage, no HDMI port to connect to a real HDMI cable, no Ethernet (more on this later), and no optical audio out. The only connection you get is a MiniUSB for power. It is no secret why these ports were removed, they cost money. The product design team was obviously instructed to make a cheap device, not a good device. Ethernet Are you freaking kidding me? You removed the wired Ethernet connection from the FireTV? Look, no matter how much Interior Designers and people who don't understand how streaming or networking works, a GOOD streaming device needs a wired Ethernet port. If you couldn't care less about picture or audio quality while watching television, go buy a FireTV Stick and hook up to WiFi. Then sit back and marvel at how neat and clean your installation is while you picture pixelates and your audio is out of sync. AGAIN. Of course there is the Ethernet dongle you can buy to add onto your FireTV pendant. So let me get this straight, I can spend $69.99 on the FireTV pendant, and another $14.99 on the adapter? I have now spent $84.98 for a cheap device that still lacks all of the other connectors of the FireTV Gen2. A whopping savings of $15.01. You have to be kidding me. (As I write this review the Ethernet adapter is back ordered for over 4 weeks.) Return The only high point of this purchase was the return process. I used an Amazon locker at my local Whole Foods and the process could not be any easier. I requested an Amazon credit and it was in my account the morning after I placed the defective unit in the locker. Very cool. Conclusion Amazon, it is time you pull a Apple Maps on this debacle. Issue a Jeff Bezos signed apology on your front page, stop pendant production, drop the price of the pendant to match the FireTV Stick so you can clear out whatever stock is still out there, retroactively refund the cost difference to customers who still own a pendant, ship out a piece of heat resistant Velcro to anyone who is hanging the device from an HDMI port (or ship them an HDMI extension cable) and put this horror show to bed. Thanks for reading, I'm now going to hook up my new NVIDIA SHIELD TV | Streaming Media Player with Remote & Game Controller.
Sort by:
Filter by:
By -
Verified Amazon Purchase
Vine Customer Review of Free Product
Sorry, no reviews match your current selections.
Try clearing or changing some filters.Show all reviews
Show more reviews