When Google launched Chromecast last year, it kicked up quite a bit of interest with its ability to easily stream video (or your desktop) wirelessly from the Chrome browser or various Chrome apps. Now, Amazon is jumping on the small device streaming wagon, with the Fire TV Stick. Amazon is crowing about the device’s capabilities — it’s a $40 product with a dual-core processor (of unknown type), 8GB of on-board storage, and 1GB of RAM. This beats the Chromecast rather handily — that device is a single-core chip with 512MB of RAM and just 2GB of storage.

With products like this, however, the real question will be how well it actually works and how seamlessly it integrates with existing equipment. And unfortunately, that integration looks fairly closed-off. While Google’s Chromecast can run on PCs that use Chrome, as well as TVs or Android devices, that same degree of flexibility isn’t quite baked into Fire TV Stick yet. The PR states that support for streaming YouTube and Spotify is currently ready, but Netflix is still “coming soon.” Devices that support Miracast will also work with Fire TV Stick, and the device comes with a remote control. It’s available now, and for the next two days — if you’re a Prime subscriber — for $20.

Overall, the Kindle Fire TV Stick still appears to focus on integrating users more tightly into Amazon’s own set of products. That’s not a bad thing intrinsically, but we would’ve liked to have seen more integration with PCs and devices that aren’t manufactured by Amazon. Right now, Kindle Fire TV Stick seems to be decent value only if you’re thoroughly plugged into the Amazon world to start with.



Distracting from Fire Phone’s flame out

A cynical person might suggest that Amazon’s song and dance around Fire TV Stick is actually meant to distract from the abysmal performance of Amazon’s other device launch this year, the Fire Phone. Reports today indicate that the company is sitting on unsold Fire Phone stock worth $83 million, and that’s after a $170 million writedown on the product.

We’ve covered the Fire Phone before, and general consensus is that while the device is a perfectly reasonable smartphone, it’s a reasonable smartphone selling at an unreasonable price against competitors with better-established products and a stronger overall software suite. That’s not entirely Amazon’s fault; much of the disparity is caused by the company’s refusal to completely toe Google’s party line. Amazon has responded to this criticism by slashing the price on the Fire Phone in an attempt to move inventory, but the company’s attempt to launch a high-end device that might capture market share from the Samsung Galaxy or iPhone product has clearly failed.

There’s no word yet on whether Amazon will follow up with a second-generation phone, but the company is expecting to be deep in the red this year. It projects a loss of between $430 and $570 million for the entire fourth quarter.

http://www.extremetech.com/computing...one-flames-out