In general the Amazon Fire TV is a great alternative to ChromeCast or some of the other internet set top boxes on the market though there were two bugs that are rather annoying. Set up was generally easy till I got to the point of entering the WiFi password. For some reason if you don't enter the password in within about 60 seconds the box reverts back to the previous screen. Normally this wouldn't be a problem on a machine with a keyboard but trying to enter an alpha numeric password with upper, lower, and symbols takes more than 60 seconds. This took several attempts before I figured out a faster way to get the password entered.
I opted for the gaming package and found some pretty good games I play on my Microsoft Surface are also available on the Fire. The second big problem I found was for some reason the box gets confused when you loop through the menus. I have not been able to successfully recreate the scenario but once this happens it says it has no more network access even though it sees the WiFi network. The bad thing is I don't want to tell the box to forget the network it's connected to (see comments above) because setting the WiFi password is painful. So the solution was to turn the power off of the box for about a minute and then plug it back in (Microsoft approach). I don't know why you can't reboot the box from menu options.
All in all it's WAY better then trying to run Amazon across ChromeCast. My wife and I have found the picture quality to be better as well. Hopefully Amazon will issue a patch to resolve some of the issues I've mentioned. Best media player
Pros:
- Load times are shorter than the Apple TV
- Default apps are comparable to Apple TV and movie selection is great
- 1080 streaming works flawlessly.
- Other apps are available without any jailbreaking/rooting...things like that. You can enable developer controls and install other apps from the app store any time. This is a HUGE bonus as you dont have to wait for people to develop FireTV specific apps. If it's available in the Google Play store, you can load it.
- No HDMI cable included. You will need to buy one of those.
