Amazon FireStick | Minor Fixes
Do you pay for cable? Have satelite? Use Netflix? Amazon Prime Video?
The main reason I wanted to do a review for Amazon FireStick is because of how often we use it. We got this a little while back and were tired of paying for cable. Not only did we have cable we also had Amazon Prime. It seemed pretty silly to be paying for Amazon Prime because there was nothing we wanted to watch on cable.
It was amazing what we were paying to have cable and watched so little of it. So since we had prime we went ahead and ordered this to give it a try. There are so many options to watch from on this and really you only need one or two.
The things we use on this are the Amazon Prime and SlingTV. The Amazon is paid for by year so we have no monthly bill for it. Sling is $20 a month unless you add packages to it. So depends what you want to have available to you. But we get all the stations we got with our cable for such a HUGE amount less!
I realize that now a lot of TV's already have built in things like Roku and you can set up your current accounts. We have 1 tv like this but what do you do with your other TV's? This stick has been such a great asset to us. We have 4 children who have certain things they watch at different times and having the variety to watch is great! Our main big screen tv is the one we use the most during family movie nights and such. The stick never lets us down when it comes to finding something family friendly. It even separates shows out for us to save us some of the hunting.
The option for the Alexa Voice Remote is available now too. We don't have that version so I can't really say if that is good or not. Although it does sound like a good idea.
We did run into a small glitch with our remote once and it must have disconnected itself somehow from the actual stick. I hit up google to see if I could find a solution and sure enough I found my answer. It was a really easy fix if you just hold the home button your remote will reconnect with the stick. That I'm aware of it only done that once so it didn't really make me think any off of the product itself.
We ended up buying one of these for my mother in law and her husband for Christmas this past year. She is not very tech savvy so when it comes to fixing any kind of issues with this kind of stuff we pretty much have to help her fix it. She had an issue where the stick kept shutting down. It would restart and shut down again and fail to load. It did this for weeks until I got over there to check it out. I'm pretty sure she had quit using it because it just wouldn't load or stay loaded. I also found the solution for this. Back to google I went. I found that this was a pretty common issue and that people had either had a damaged cord or tried to use another cord with their FireStick. This creates the issue where it will continuously say its loading or shut down and try to restart.
She had tried to replace the FireStick cord with a longer cord. Of course the longer cord fit into the stick. It was a longer phone charger cord. Once we removed the phone cord and plugged the original cord back into it, it loaded up right away. Kind of a pain that you can't just use another cord. If you were to damage its cord then what do you do? It nearly renders your stick useless. This did make me think less of the product but not by much.
We keep our stick constantly plugged into our tv so we don't move it around from tv to tv and the odds of it getting damaged are a lot less. But if I were to rate the actual product I would still rate it 4 out of 5 just because IF something should happen to the cord...
I'm quite sure that if you have been researching if Amazon FireStick is any good or not then you have heard of Kodi. Kodi is a program that you can install on your stick and watch movies. They call it a jail break firestick. I have seen this even posted with people selling the sticks with this already included for way more then they paid for the stick. I may have something on this later in another post.
I will call this a close and I hope you enjoyed reading my review. I would recommend this product to anyone who doesn't have things like Roku and if you were planning to buy it and leave it plugged into one TV.
