As you may have heard, Amazon released the Fire TV this week, it’s own competitor to the Apple TV and other living room devices like the Roku. Because I’m a fan of all-things tech and love pretty much any excuse to check out a new gadget, I ordered one on the day of release.
It arrived yesterday. Over the last 24 hours I’ve had a chance to play with it a little bit and thought I would report my initial reactions.
The Fire TV ships in Amazon’s “Frustration Free” packaging, which is always a plus with me. I love how easy it is to get the box open, find all the pieces and start to get the device set up. The Fire TV box contains the device itself (a small, black box), a small power adaptor, a remote control with batteries and an instruction booklet.
It does not come with an HDMI cable, or any other way to connect the Fire TV to your TV. But that shouldn’t come as any surprise. Fortunately, I have a healthy supply of cables at home, so this was no problem at all. But don’t forget to buy one if you don’t have one already.
Physical setup was a breeze. Simply connect the power adaptor to the device and a power outlet, the HDMI cable to your TV and the device powers up and gets going. As you might expect, the first thing the device wants is an Internet connection. I decided to connect the Fire TV to my wireless network, mostly because I wanted to see how it handled streaming 1080p content that way.
Navigating through the device’s menu for connection to my wireless network was very easy using the included remote. The Fire TV found my network immediately and once I entered the password using the remote and onscreen keyboard, it connected the first time and I was online. So far, so good.