Amazon Fire TV: New Set-Top Box Features Powerful Processor, Slick Voice Recognition, Game Control; Elegant, But Still Half-Baked

Amazon Fire TV: Powered by quad-core processor with 2GB of RAM, the Amazon Fire TV has entered the set-top box arena and challenged the Roku 3, Apple TV, and Google Chromecast with its competitive price and features.

Retailing at $99, the device is user-friendly but still powerful. It aims to address the fall backs or issues that users have with other set-top boxes—a good call when it comes to promotion, but does it deliver? Some critics appear to disagree. TechRadar even said, “it doesn't entirely live up to some of the promises Amazon is making.”

Although it already has the size of a small external hard drive, the Fire TV could have improved more on its design and even go a bit smaller to look less beefy, more portable, and more elegant.

Still, under the hood the Fire TV shows great power and potential against its competitors. It sports a dual-core processor coupled with a sound GPU and 2 GB RAM. In fact, Amazon claims that its processor is three times more powerful than the Apple TV, Chromecast or even Roku 3, saying that it can process 57 billion floating points per second.

One of its proud features is a voice recognition software that lets its users search or browse using a microphone on the remote control. This is a great improvement considering all the effort you can save from searching and manually skimming through an on-screen letter grid. And fortunately, this cloud-powered voice recognition feature does a good job at understanding what its users are trying to say.

Any time soon Amazon will roll out its official music channel. But for now, Fire TV users can listen to third party music services such as iHeartRadio, Pandora and TuneIn. Upon the launch of Amazon’s music channel, users will be able to play songs purchased from the company’s MP3 store or Cloud Drive.

Amazon has also given some special attention to its gaming features and has opted for an optional game controller.

One fault line that critics are poking at is the fact that third party apps must be downloaded and set up separately. Moreover, although it is fairly simple and easy to use, the Fire TV is still not flexible enough to let its users customize its settings. In the words of TechRadar, its users are “at the mercy of the one-size-fits-all menu hierarchy Amazon has created.”

"Amazon's set-top box is elegant and powerful but not as open as it would like you to think," it adds.