Alongside the new 4K-friendly Fire TV box, Amazon unveiled a new Fire TV Stick mini streamer. But we’re not that impressed.
We should have said ‘new’ in inverted commas because the stick itself is exactly the same as the regular one – only thing that’s really different here is the remote control supports voice control.
Amazon’s voice control system is really good; it’s powered by IMDb (which Amazon owns) which means you can afford to be super-vague with your searches.
If you’re trying to remember for the life of you what that ‘90s movie about high school witches was called, but you know that Fairuza Balk and Neve Campbell were in it, if you utter their names into the microphone of the remote, you should get your answer.
Voice controls were a standard feature of the original Amazon Fire TV box that was launched last year. For cost reasons, Amazon opted to remove this feature from the remote when it launched its cheaper Chromecast-shaped Fire TV Stick less than a year later.
While voice controls weren’t baked into the supplied remote, you could still make use of them via the iOS and Android apps which replicate this feature perfectly and actually, in our opinion, make for a better navigation tool than the supplied remote.
Don’t get us wrong, we love the Fire TV Stick – we gave it 9/10 in our glowing review which you can read here – but we just don’t see the point in this new (but not really new) model. Unless, of course, you’re a Windows Phone or BlackBerry user.
If you fall into this category, then you might as well spend an extra tenner on the Amazon Fire TV Stick Voice, which will be priced at £45 when it goes on sale on October 22.
Alternatively, you can pick up a Fire TV Stick for £35 right now, saving yourself a bit of time and money.
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