Amazon Fire TV – a review

I had an Amazon Fire TV on pre-order from those nice people at Amazon for its UK launch. This mini-review was posted elsewhere after about a week of use. Nothing has really changed as yet.

Music
SB Player (an Android Squeezebox player) bought (£1.86) and loaded. Sounding good. Music sorted apart from the now playing that I would really like but …
I am not at this stage going to sideload the Squeezebox now playing app which I have on my Galaxy Tab because it seems highly unlikely that it is going to look any good (apologies to the developer) and the manner in which you would need to launch it (see later) instead I have uploaded some photos to the Amazon Cloud for screensaver purposes.

Movies & TV
Amazon Prime
Netflix
TV Player – live UK TV incl BBC, ITV, C4 & 5 but SD I think.

Catch Up TV
BBC iPlayer
5 OD
STVPlayer
No ITV or C4 as yet
NB. The only devices that have all UK catch up services I have found so far are Samsung smart TV & networked Blu Ray players, Sony PS3 and Roku.

Movies stored on my NAS.
Tried VMU Player an official app costing a few pence which said it would do the job. It played the video but with no audio. Rubbish.
Sideloaded XBMC (Xodi). Up and running in no time. The only downside is that you can’t it seems add the app to the home screen you have to launch it via System/Applications/Manage Applications/ scroll to XBMC and then launch. The Fire TV remote controls it for the most part but won’t let you do a select and hold. iPhone remote will however so no big issue.

Other Apps
Haven’t tried anything else as yet.

The hardware is very good (Ethernet/Wireless, HDMI,Optical & USB) and at £80 is about the real price of a Raspberry Pi once you have added in the SD card, case etc
So far impressed.