absurdly smart for its good price

In Europe we have several options to turn your TV into a smart one. On the one hand, we have premium options such as Apple TV or Nvidia Shield, while on the other side of the scale we find excessively cheap products, such as the Amazon Fire TV Stick Lite, the latest device from the company to arrive.

After you’ve tried the Amazon Echo, it’s time to try out the Fire TV Stick Lite, Amazon’s next-gen device that can turn your old TV into a smart TV. Now it’s much faster and even cheaper. Why is this promising?

An unchanged design, but that works

The first thing that we discover when opening the Fire TV Stick box is a remote control, a power adapter, some kind of HDMI extension cable and the device that we will connect to the TV. If you were already familiar with the Fire TV, you will realize that it is exactly the same as in the previous generation. If you have never seen this device, it will look like a USB key very large.

Inside this device is everything you need to make your TV smart, incorporating a quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage, enough to install most streaming video apps.

As seen in the image, the device in addition to being connected to the TV requires power via a microUSB port. We can connect it to the power charger that came with the device or to your TV’s USB port in case it has one. In case you bet on this mode, remember that when the TV is turned off the Fire TV will also turn off, so you will have to wait for the system to boot up every time you turn on the TV.

More powerful, faster and better

Once we plug in the device, we’ll find our own Amazon system. It is based on Android, although it has been completely customized by Amazon to deliver its TV experience.

As with the rest of Amazon products, we don’t have the Google Play Store, but the Amazon App Store. Although the device comes with several preinstalled apps, we can download pretty much any app available in the store. Most streaming services are available, such as YouTube, Netflix, Disney + or Spotify, as well as TV channels such as Spanish TV and other channels like Atres Player. In our daily life, we have not found the most used service that is on Android TV and not on Fire TV.

One of the biggest added values ​​of the Fire TV Stick Lite is, like the rest of the devices in its family, the integration with Amazon Echo. While the remote is ready to work with Alexa, with a button and a dedicated microphone, we also have the option of using the Amazon Echo you have in the room (if you have one).

What’s the point? Well, it gives us the option of using the TV hands-free, being able to turn it on, off, ask you to turn the volume up or down, or open a certain series on Netflix. Voice control can be improved, but it can be useful when you can’t find the remote. Or, why fool us, when you know exactly where it is but don’t want to get up off the couch.

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The software is designed to get the most out of Amazon Prime Video, being a great recommendation for having the Amazon subscription. The company not only bets on its own content, but has gradually added local content to its catalog, with several Spanish series. There are new ones, others that have been around for a while and I won’t deny that my best use of Prime Video is to watch Person Living Here or Aida, the series are very entertaining (it doesn’t matter when you’re reading this) .

And what about Lite?

But let’s get to the heart of the matter. If it is a Lite product Should it be worse than the classic Fire TV Stick?

Well, oddly not, and does like its older brother this model include new hardware that offers 50% more performance compared to the previous generation, both are ready to run at a maximum resolution of 1080p FullHD and are compatible with Dolby Atmos and are compatible with HDR, HDR 10+ and HLG content. After analyzing the two new generation Fire TV sticks, they are the exact same devices.

Reading the remote is the only difference.

The standard model remote includes buttons to control the volume and turn the TV on or off. This allows that if the TV is to be used exclusively for Fire TV, we only need the Amazon remote control, while in the Lite model we will have to do these two actions with the traditional TV remote control (or by asking Alexa ).

I buy it?

Although we mainly mentioned the Amazon Fire TV Stick Lite, the truth is that most aspects can be applied to the standard Fire TV as well. Both models are exactly the same except for the differences we mentioned in the order, the rest of the experience being exactly the same.

The difference between one model and another is $ 10, so it’s very easy to gauge how useful it is to be able to control the volume and turn the TV on and off from the Fire TV Stick remote. . 10 dollars is not something that weighs a lot, so if in doubt you can always go for the cheaper model. It costs almost 10 dollars to have one remote control instead of two.

But in the end it’s not that it matters much, especially when you take into account that these Black Friday days the Fire TV Stick Lite has dropped to $ 19.99. For less than 20 dollars you have a device Very full. It’s not that it’s a crazy discount (its official price is 29.99 dollars) but it breaks the psychological barrier of 20 dollars, becoming a purchase that doesn’t have much to lift. Whether it’s for yourself or as a gift, it’s awesome.