Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max review
OUR VERDICT
The Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max caters substantially to Amazon Prime members and Alexa- grounded smart home possessors, but it’s still an incontrovertibly important device at an affordable price. We do n’t love how Amazon’s enforced advertisements on the home runner and have issues with hunt, but we still feel this is the stylish streaming device for Amazon Prime subscribers.
That said, while a lot of work has easily been done under the hood, the stoner interface for Amazon’s rearmost banderole remains the same as former times, and focuses astronomically on Amazon’s crucial streaming service, Amazon Prime Video. That final bit makes it a best streaming stick for Amazon Prime members, but a rather lousy one if you do n’t want to shell out for Amazon’s all-in-one subscription service.
The good news is that videotape streaming is only half of what a Fire Stick can do. It’s also suitable to keep track of your smart home bias and supports Amazon’s Luna game streaming service- making it a great rival to Google’s excellent Chromecast with Google Television. TikTok is now available on Amazon’s Fire Sticks, too, if scrolling through endless cotillion content is your thing.
It’s not absolutely indefectible and the limited advertising might irk some folks, but for anyone who loves Alexa, shops with Prime and is interested in Amazon’s trial in game streaming, the affordabl
Price and release date
The Amazon Fire TV Stick 4
The Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max pushes the streaming stick form factor to its apex, offering briskly performance and support for the rearmost Wi-Fi norms. K Max was released on October 7, 2021, and is now available for $65/£55/AU$99.That’s just a many bucks more than the aged Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K, and you ’re getting a high performance as well as the Wi-Fi 6 antenna.
Of course, we do not expect that to be the final price for the 4K Max. Around Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Amazon Prime Day, we ’re awaiting to see some huge abatements on the banderole as Amazon attempts to contend with analogous deals from Roku and Google.
Speaking of Roku and Google, it’s worth noting that there are rival bias to the 4K Max that offer a lot of the same functionality- videlicet, the Chromecast with Google Television and the new Roku Streaming Stick 4K (2021). Both support Dolby Vision HDR and numerous of the same services, still neither has access to Luna. All three are great for different types of guests, so it’s worth visiting all three reviews before you make a decision.
Design
Still, if you only look at the outside of the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max, you wouldn’t think much has changed in its most recent incarnation.
In fact, if you were to put the 4K Max next to the 4K and vid up the ensigns, you might not be suitable to tell the difference between them-they are both flat USB stick-sized bias with an HDMI harborage sticking out of them.
While they look analogous they are, we assure you, veritably different; all the new features for this model are passing under the hood.
To make it briskly, Amazon has upgraded the quantum of memory the Stick has to 2 GB, around a third further than the old model had. On top of that, the new SoC runs at 100 MHz briskly than its precursor, which is what Amazon says makes the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max around 40 faster than the Fire TV Stick 4K.
Of course, all this power wouldn’t be worth important if the 4K Max plodded with pulling data down over Wi-Fi-that is why Amazon decided to equip it with a Wi-Fi 6 (802.11 layoff) antenna that enables a theoretical maximum speed of 3.5 Gbps … not that we are awaiting anyone’s internet to live up to that kind of speed. However, you ’re principally unborn-proofing your streaming device for unborn upgrades to your wireless network, If anything..
What’s the duplicate between the two miniatures is that, like its angel, the Fire TV Stick 4K Max also comes with a Bluetooth voice remote. The Fire TV Stick 4K Max remote now comes with quick launch buttons for Prime Video, Netflix, Disney Plus and Hulu-all of which feel like strong choices-as well as a live Television key and a new blue key for Alexa. These changes are fairly insignificant in the grand scheme of effects but they surely do n’t take anything down from the experience moreover.
Features
Once you’ve plant either a USB harborage with enough power affair to charge the device or a wall outlet to plug the Fire Television 4K Max into, you will bobble it up to find a familiar log-in big screen asking you for your Amazon account facts and a preference on which apps you’d like installed.So long as you have that information handy, setup should just take a many twinkles.
Once it’s perfect, you’ll see the main interface for Fire Television that’s split into three tabs: Home, Find, and Live, with a revolving top row of featured shows and pictures curated by Amazon as well as some advertisements. Having advertisements on the homescreen is annoying, especially considering the first row of apps under the Home section are also patronized choices.
Move down the stoner interface and you will start to find rows of shows and pictures lumped together by a common theme, like New Advents, Free on Amazon Prime, Comedy Pictures, etc. This content-first donation clearly looks nice and indeed comes with some good recommendations right near the top, but you have to pay close attention to see which of the displays and pictures are really available on Amazon Prime Video, and which of them will bring you some plutocrat to stream.
There’s also the problem that Amazon puts its own happiness front and center and will steer you towards buying a display on its service rather than anywhere else. That makes for an expert business feel, but not a stylish stoner experience.
What makes up for these effects kindly is Amazon’s recent integration with further free television services: you’ll now detect IMDb television shows and pictures available on the streaming stick as well as free original and public news networks in the US. This will offer cord-knives a wealth of content at no additional cost and will help Amazon stay on par with Roku’s The Roku Channel, which offers much of the same functionality.
On top of those free services, you’ll also find numerous of the equal services you’ve come to anticipate from streaming sticks, including Netflix, Hulu, Disney Plus, and indeed Apple TV. You’ll also find YouTube and YouTube TV on there (the ultimate of which isn’t available on Roku), as well as a number of music streaming services. The collection of apps is emotional and should keep you entertained for a long, long time.
Performance
So how well does it work? Pretty darn well. Out of the box, the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max offers 4K HDR streaming, plus Dolby Vision, HDR10 +, and Dolby Atmos support. That’s pretty much every slice-edge format we know about, minus many of the outliers, giving you a crisp, varied experience.
To test out what 4K HDR content looked like, we followed many occurrences of the recently released All or Nothing season, succeeding the Toronto Maple Leafs. Differ looked exceptional on our 75-inch Hisense experiment television with good highlights and black situations, as did color achromatism and sharpness.
Actually, it did take a many seconds to reach maximum conclusion after playback started, but when it got there it was as good as we ’ve looked Amazon Prime Video look on a 4K Television.
In fact the only annoying part of the experience does not do when you go to play content-it happens when you ’re previewing it on the homescreen. There, in the upper-right corner of the screen, is a veritably low- resolution sample of the content you ’re about to follow. Seeing that on a 4K streamer is a little disconcercerting, especially one packing as much power as the 4K Max.
To test shows in Dolby Vision, we had to download the Netflix app – no matter. Indeed though the download was small, the 4K Max downloaded it extremely snappily and installed it in just a many seconds. You ’ll still have to subscribe in, which can add a many seconds, but you can veritably snappily have new apps over and running thanks to the briskly Wi-Fi and redundant memory. Lower than 30-seconds latterly, we had The Witcher in 4K Dolby Vision and Atmos on Netflix.
But what happens if you ’re less sure about what you want to watch? Or perhaps kind of sure about the name of the movie, but not where to watch it? For those cases you ’ll have to rotate to Alexa and the Fire TV’s erected-in hunt function.
Still, say, pictures with Kurt Russell, If you want to see. Alexa will also show you all the pictures that are part of your subscriptions starring Russell as well as free pictures from other services with Russell in it. Search for a peculiar movie starring Russell like, say, Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2, and Alexa will show you where to watch it. In that particular case, the 4K Max does a good job displaying you that the film is available to watch with a Disney Plus subscription before displaying you the options to let it from Amazon.
While all of the hunt features feel to generate fairly well, they ’re still not the stylish streaming platforms have to offer. Search results on Amazon Fire Television are sorted into a many helpful rows, but there’s no association to the results beyond that. The hunt for Kurt Russell pictures started out with The Christmas Chronicles, a 2018 movie starring Russell as Santa Claus, that was generally helpful, but the veritably coming movie was F9 ( Fast & Furious 9) where Russell only played a minor part.That’s a minor quibble to be sure, but it’s one example of Fire TV’s search results being not quite as well thought out as they could have been.
Last but not least, we’ve to explain about Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max’s integration with Luna that is, well, simply OK.As much as we ’d allowed we ’d see nearly indefectible performance from Luna on the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max, it simply did n’t be. Utmost games played nicely well on our 100 Mbps wireless connection, but there were a many troubling occasions of pause that estranged the experience. That’s especially disturbing when a stutter-free experience on our computer is just one room down-but it turns out that indeed a Wi-Fi 6 antenna does n’t beat a ingrained connection.
Overall, Luna is playable on the 4K Max but it’s not our favored way of penetrating the service.
