The hardware on the Amazon Fire TV
is quite powerful and the interface is
quite polished. Pair that with Amazon
Prime and the deal becomes a lot
more sweeter...if you were living in
the US. For us folks in India this
device is a luxury and it is the living
room experience that sells it. Owning
one and making use of its potential
can be quite the expensive affair but
if Amazon does bring a more
Indianised version of the Fire TV then
it will be a force to reckon with.
POPULAR
GADGETS DEALS
Amazon unveiled the Fire TV in the
US on April 2, 2014 and it has
attracted quite a lot of attention,
unfortunately it’s only available in the
US at the moment. We got our hands
on one of these thanks to
Shopyourworld.com which has started
selling the device in India at a price
of Rs.9420(price is based on current
foreign exchange rates). You can
check it out over at their site. There
are quite a few streaming media
players available in the market at the
moment but how well does the
Amazon Fire TV fare against these
devices is what we are interested in.
Also, you can check out the slideshow
here.
Hardware
The Amazon Fire TV has some decent
hardware to boast of when you look
at the competition. The SOC is the
Qualcomm Snapdragon 8064 which
has a quad-core Qualcomm Krait 300
as the processor and a Qualcomm
Adreno 320 as the GPU. This same
combination is present in the
Samsung Galaxy S4 and Asus Padfone
Infinity. The SoC variant in the
Amazon Fire TV scales up to 1.7 GHz
as and when the need for more
processing power arises. There is a 2
GB low-power Samsung K3PE0E00QM-
CGC2 DDR2 memory chip that is
clocked at 533 MHz which is what the
Fire TV uses for the RAM. For storage
it uses a Toshiba THGBM5G6A2JBAIR
which is an 8 GB eMMC NAND flash
memory chip.
When it comes to connectivity the
device has Wi-Fi 802.11n dual-band
capability and Bluetooth 4.0. Wi-Fi
has MIMO support but if you are to
use just the remote control with the
device then it is redundant, but if you
are to use a Kindle Fire and the
controller along with it then MIMO
does make sense. The ethernet port is
a 10/100 Mbps port which is sufficient
for the kind of content that is
streamed onto the device. The display
output is either 720p or 1080p but
you do have content from the 60’s till
the late 90’s which are still in SD
available on Amazon’s video service.
Image source - iFixit
On the rear we see very few ports.
There is the power socket, HDMI
output, optical audio output, ethernet
and a USB 2.0 port.
The hardware on the Amazon Fire TV
is more than what the competition
has to offer and it is pretty evident
from the table below.
Device Amazon Fire
SoC Snapdragon 8
CPU Krait 300
Cores 4
Speed (Up to) 1.7 GHz
GPU Adreno 32
RAM 2 GB
Ethernet 100 Mbps
Wi-Fi 802.11n
Dual-band
Remote
The remote that comes with the
Amazon Fire TV has very few buttons
as you can see from the image below.
There are 8 buttons and a pad for
navigation on the remote. What’s
unique with this remote is that it has
voice search functionality. All you
need to do is press the button on the
top and speak into the remote when
prompted with a beep from your TV.
A little issue that we noticed was that
the voice search functionality did not
function if you did not use a VPN
with the Fire TV.
The buttons are reminiscent of the
current android interface which has
the back, home and properties
button. The ones shown here function
in the exact same manner. The
buttons are all tactile and thus, they
do make quite the noise when you
are navigating furiously or if you are
typing out any form. Amazon has
hidden RFID tags within the remote
and the Fire TV which has no known
functionality at the moment, so we
might be in for a surprise some time
in the future. http://www.digit.in/general/fire-tv-review-23540.html
is quite powerful and the interface is
quite polished. Pair that with Amazon
Prime and the deal becomes a lot
more sweeter...if you were living in
the US. For us folks in India this
device is a luxury and it is the living
room experience that sells it. Owning
one and making use of its potential
can be quite the expensive affair but
if Amazon does bring a more
Indianised version of the Fire TV then
it will be a force to reckon with.
POPULAR
GADGETS DEALS
Amazon unveiled the Fire TV in the
US on April 2, 2014 and it has
attracted quite a lot of attention,
unfortunately it’s only available in the
US at the moment. We got our hands
on one of these thanks to
Shopyourworld.com which has started
selling the device in India at a price
of Rs.9420(price is based on current
foreign exchange rates). You can
check it out over at their site. There
are quite a few streaming media
players available in the market at the
moment but how well does the
Amazon Fire TV fare against these
devices is what we are interested in.
Also, you can check out the slideshow
here.
Hardware
The Amazon Fire TV has some decent
hardware to boast of when you look
at the competition. The SOC is the
Qualcomm Snapdragon 8064 which
has a quad-core Qualcomm Krait 300
as the processor and a Qualcomm
Adreno 320 as the GPU. This same
combination is present in the
Samsung Galaxy S4 and Asus Padfone
Infinity. The SoC variant in the
Amazon Fire TV scales up to 1.7 GHz
as and when the need for more
processing power arises. There is a 2
GB low-power Samsung K3PE0E00QM-
CGC2 DDR2 memory chip that is
clocked at 533 MHz which is what the
Fire TV uses for the RAM. For storage
it uses a Toshiba THGBM5G6A2JBAIR
which is an 8 GB eMMC NAND flash
memory chip.
When it comes to connectivity the
device has Wi-Fi 802.11n dual-band
capability and Bluetooth 4.0. Wi-Fi
has MIMO support but if you are to
use just the remote control with the
device then it is redundant, but if you
are to use a Kindle Fire and the
controller along with it then MIMO
does make sense. The ethernet port is
a 10/100 Mbps port which is sufficient
for the kind of content that is
streamed onto the device. The display
output is either 720p or 1080p but
you do have content from the 60’s till
the late 90’s which are still in SD
available on Amazon’s video service.
Image source - iFixit
On the rear we see very few ports.
There is the power socket, HDMI
output, optical audio output, ethernet
and a USB 2.0 port.
The hardware on the Amazon Fire TV
is more than what the competition
has to offer and it is pretty evident
from the table below.
Device Amazon Fire
SoC Snapdragon 8
CPU Krait 300
Cores 4
Speed (Up to) 1.7 GHz
GPU Adreno 32
RAM 2 GB
Ethernet 100 Mbps
Wi-Fi 802.11n
Dual-band
Remote
The remote that comes with the
Amazon Fire TV has very few buttons
as you can see from the image below.
There are 8 buttons and a pad for
navigation on the remote. What’s
unique with this remote is that it has
voice search functionality. All you
need to do is press the button on the
top and speak into the remote when
prompted with a beep from your TV.
A little issue that we noticed was that
the voice search functionality did not
function if you did not use a VPN
with the Fire TV.
The buttons are reminiscent of the
current android interface which has
the back, home and properties
button. The ones shown here function
in the exact same manner. The
buttons are all tactile and thus, they
do make quite the noise when you
are navigating furiously or if you are
typing out any form. Amazon has
hidden RFID tags within the remote
and the Fire TV which has no known
functionality at the moment, so we
might be in for a surprise some time
in the future. http://www.digit.in/general/fire-tv-review-23540.html
