Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max (2021) with Remote (3rd Gen) (Scratch & Dent)
$24.99
Condition: Scratch & Dent
Top positive review
16 people found this helpful
Why I recommend Fire Stick 4K
By Michael H. Creagh on Reviewed in the United States on November 12, 2023
Fire Sick vs Nvidia Shield Onn and Android Boxes Nov 11, 2023 First, I’m not trying to sway anyone’s preference. I’m just providing my experience and knowledge as guidance to what is arguably the most often asked question by those new to streaming, some variation of, “Should I buy this device or that?” When I was 18 and looking to buy my first motorcycle an older, wiser rider told me not to buy the biggest, most powerful bike I could afford. Start small and spend less to learn and decide what you really want. The same applies to streaming devices. You can spend $200+ for an Nvidia Shield or start small with a $20 Onn or a Fire Stick 4K for $25-30 depending on promotions. Later if you feel you need the Shield, they’ll still be available. In the great debate, I’m on the Fire Stick side even though I admit I’ve never used any other device. Here’s why… 1. Price. I can have 2 Fire Sticks on all 3 of my TVs That’s 6 Fire Sticks for the price of 1 Nvidia Shields. 2. Having multiple Fire Sicks allows me to quickly switch between shows by simply changing the source on the TV. Although my TVs don’t support Picture-in-Picture for HDMI input, if yours does, you have that capability as well. Available memory is not a problem for me personally, using multiple Sticks allows you to distribute applications among them negating the argument that Sticks don’t have enough memory. Also, TiViMate allows recording, but recording while viewing often fails. Using a separate Stick for recording solves the problem. 3. Although it’s true that Amazon controls the Operating System on the Stick and loads up a lot of bloatware (software you don’t need or want) that has been inconsequential for me. It is largely outweighed by easy access to a plethora of free apps in the Amazon App Store and the ability restore your settings and apps from Amazon. This is tremendously helpful if you need to do a factory reset, upgrade to a later version of the Stick, or want to duplicate your setup on multiple Sticks. There are other more advanced controls available through the Amazon site which most people won’t use, but give you more control of your Sticks by restricting access and resetting remotely. I don’t think you’ll find these convences with any other streaming device. 4. I can use my TV remote to control both the Stick and TV simultaneously. This is incredibly convenient especially when switching between multiple Sticks. The Amazon Fire TV Remote smartphone app is a good alternative to the Stick remote, but it also has one outstanding feature for advanced users. You can cut and paste to the app. This won’t be of importance to you until you find yourself attempting to use the onscreen keyboard to enter long strings of text necessary to setup some applications. Onn and Shield may support some are all of these capabilities, but as of this writing it appears Onn does not allow Cut and Paste and it’s unclear to me if Shield does. 5. Portability. I’ve taken my Fire Stick traveling in multiple countries with no problem. It’s small, easily packed and if lost, stolen or damaged you’re only out about 30 bucks. Most hotels and Air BnBs have sufficient, unrestricted internet and TVs with accessible HDMI ports to plug into. Remember when traveling you’ll want to take the Fire Stick remote since the smartphone remote app has to be on the same network and the TV may not support the CEC remote sharing feature. You’ll need the Stick remote to establish a connection to the hotel network, then you can use your smartphone. You might also want to carry an extension cord. If you’re traveling outside the US and canada you might want to include a 3 prong to 2 prong electrical outlet converter as well. 6. Speed and picture quality. Nvidia proponents will say that the Stick is slower and has lower video quality. I have yet to see a real world side-by-side comparison of how this results in a better viewing experience. No question the Shield is significantly faster and has more memory, but the Stick delivers a true 4K picture without buffering (screen freezing or stuttering). Most buffering on the Stick results from an Internet, WiFi provider issue, or lack of memory. I'm able to run K O D I with several addons, TiViMate, a few other apps and several diagnostic apps with 1 gb of free memory. But, as I said earlier, you can always spread your apps across multiple Sticks. Since the Stick plays 4K without any problems, the only advantage of the Shield's speed is in non-viewing operations such as searches, navigation, file transfers and deletions. 7. Durability. The Stick was introduced 9 years ago. First gen Sticks are still functioning. My 5 year old 2nd gen is still kicking. Yes functionality, speed and memory have improved with the subsequent releases, but you could buy every upgraded version and still not have paid as much as one Shield. This is based on my 5 years of experience with the Stick. I may not be 100% accurate about the Shield or Onn, but I’m not debating or trying to change anyone’s preference.
Top critical review
258 people found this helpful
Buggy, buggy, buggy! Intermittently stops working, software bugs, usability misses
By Customer on Reviewed in the United States on November 19, 2021
After hours of trying to set up this product and thinking its finally working multiple times I keep encountering more product bugs. I purchased the top of the line 4K Max stick and found the following: 1) Spent an hour setting up the stick, added our family’s amazon account and it downloaded the Kids’ profiles. Cool experience, Amazon Kids UI for the kids —- if it worked. Everytime I tried to swap to one of the Kids’ profiles an error message appeared saying an error occurred changing profiles and to try again later. Changing to adult profiles worked fine. Called Amazon Fire support, they didn’t have that error in their documentation, but they had me factory reset the stick which erased all the apps and settings I just finished setting up. After the reset the Kids’ profiles would open, so I spent several hours downloading various apps and authenticating each one with my cable provider - one by one so I could watch ABC, NBC, etc. Some apps were better than others and detected they were on a cable provider’s connection, where others required me to manually login, most required going to a webpage and entering a code to unlock streaming. 2) The Amazon video app isn’t compatible with Amazon Kids mode. If you press the Amazon video app button on the remote while in Kids mode an error appears saying the app isn’t supported. This makes sense, kind of, since Kids mode is its own video app, but the experience here is broken. 3) After I thought everything finally worked I tried to actually watch a video as my Kid’s account. Black screen, nothing! Left the kid profile and went to an adult and then back and the video started playing suddenly. Tried that same step again for another video and it wouldn’t play. Rebooted stick and video played without issue. Update: Day#2: Kids woke up and tried to watch videos. They were able to intuitively navigate the remote control, however, they woke us up saying the videos didn’t work. The Amazon Kids video black screen returned again. I was able to go back and get to an adult profile with our parental code and everything worked fine - this is a bug in the Kids app. Reboot fixed it again, but who wants to need to teach their kids to reboot their fire stick every few days? Day#3 Kids were watching videos and turned off TV. They tried to turn on TV and the screen was black. I needed to know to try to navigate to home from the black screen. This felt like a poor implementation of HDCP copy protection where it stopped playback when the TV was turned off but didn’t display a message or return gracefully to the video app. 4) The video in general was horrible on my TV - just about everything had a flicker, including menus, etc. I disabled HDR and it fixed the issues. 5) When exiting and returning to kids mode (including a different child’s profile) the screen will display the prior child’s screen content, go black and then end up where expected on the correct child’s profile home screen 6) Performance is really bad at times when not doing anything taxing. This is especially true when trying to add applications. I tried to download several at a time in queue and one of them errored out during the install (not the download). Lots of navigation lags and freezes. This reminds me of an old cable box when they first supported on demand and apps - changing from one app to another was slow and often long load screens. Same here, except its inconsistent. It acts like the storage in the stick is low end and can’t keep up at times. 7) There appears to be no system-wide way to disable the voice remote feature. A couple apps supported this feature, but those were seldom. 8) The remote control feels cheap. The left/right/up/down/select buttons feel flimsy especially given how often they get used. The remote in general was smaller and lighter than expected. 9) The whole apps experience is annoyingly complex. They have featured apps which they make easy to find, but then you can get the app store app to go search for other apps. The home screen feels like Amazon Video with rows of video content recommendations and upsells, but no way to customize the tiles. To get to apps you’ve installed you need to scroll over to the add app icon in the menu bar which will show installed apps. There is no option to make that the default landing screen when the home button is pressed, nor promote all apps to the home screen (or turn off all of the other video and app upsells/recommendations on the home screen 10) my Fire stick has updated multiple times tonight fully. Support insists that a factory reset wouldn’t revert system updates, but yet it needed updates after the factory reset. Undesirable but understandable. But whats more odd is the stick has been “fully up to date” and then later needing updates 2-3 times since then. 11) on the home screen (filled with recommendations of apps and videos) there is no filter options to only display things we own. Many video apps (such as Amazon video) have intermixed free and ads in their menus - this is more of that style of approach, except its on a hardware device which was needed to be purchased vs a software video app. Meanwhile the apps which will show content we subscribe to (ABC, NBC, etc) get pushed to another place which is obscurely navigated to via an icon in the menu bar which looks like its for adding new apps. 12) Also, I’ve found that in the Kids video app there is not an easy way to ply a video from the beginning. There is a single play arrow which resumes the video from the last location. To play from the beginning we need to start playback and rewind or go into a more options menu and select play from beginning. This is in the Kids video app, which makes it far too complex for small kids. Why Amazon omitted their play from beginning icon which is present on their other platforms is unclear and an usability miss. 13) There are parent profiles and Kids profiles, but the parent profiles don’t timeout if they sit idle for too long. Ideally if we forget to logout in the evening the Fire stick would have an option after x hours to return to the profile screen so the kids have access to kid safe content 14) while idle, the Fire screen saver with no one logged in seems to be scenic landscapes, but when logged in to a parent profile I saw video upsells which are not always young kid appropriate (action adventure video upsells). Ex: code black ad with a photo of a guy screaming with a scary face, yellow jacket image of girl with bugged out eyes, bloody nose, bee on face, I know what you did last summer image of partly topless (but not explicit) people. The entire screen saver is a rotating advertisement when logged in vs the scenic landscapes displayed when logged out. The top banner image bar on the adult profile having a picture of a lady with a bloody nose big eyes and bumble bees on her face (ad for yellow jackets) wasn’t toddler appropriate. Although this was all while in a parent profile, I didn’t expect simply sitting at a home screen menu would be inappropriate for young kids. 15) This is missing feature vs a bug, but there is not an “Input select” button on the Fire remote. So while it can volume up, power on/off a TV there is no way to change to another device without walking over to the TV or keeping another remote around. This isn’t an issue if Fire stick is the only thing plugged in to the TV, but if there is a game console plugged in, a cable box, etc being able to change inputs is more annoying because of that one button not existing on the remote. Plugging the fire stick to an Xbox HDMI input/passthrough might be a work around but that adds complexity and devalues the stick’s appeal of having all the apps on it ( most of which also exist on the Xbox)
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