A popular gadget for transforming your plain old TV into a new-fangled smart TV is an Amazon Fire Stick, as simply plugging one of these into your set will let you stream from different apps and platforms with ease.
Coming up on Tuesday, 11 July is Amazon Prime Day and this is always a great opportunity to find discounts on the company's various devices like Kindles, Fire tabs and Echos. Of course, Amazon Fire Sticks are among the most frequently discounted such devices.
An Amazon Fire Stick gives you easy access to the best streaming services or live TV streaming services, with Prime Video, Netflix, iPlayer, Disney Plus and more all easy to stream with no hassle. Best of all, you plug them into a non-smart TV to turn it smart, letting you avoid the high cost of a smart TV or keeping your beloved set.
Something that not everyone knows, is that there isn't just one Amazon Fire TV Stick on the market. No, the company offers a few different options, which offer different feature sets and resolutions and come at different prices.
Black Friday is coming at the end of November, and alongside streaming deals, we'll likely see lots of Fire Stick deals too. That's because Amazon is quick to discount its own products every time there's an opportunity for a sale — it sometimes even starts its own deals early. You can check out to see if there are any live Fire Stick deals here.
While these Fire Sticks come with a remote, we've also got a guide on the best Amazon Fire TV remotes if you want something more feature-packed. We'll run through the different offerings, to help you understand which Fire TV Stick is the best one for you.
This is the sweet spot in the Fire Stick range: cheaper models lack the 4K resolution, Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision support this Fire TV stick offers, and the features it lacks — Wi-Fi 6 and live Picture in Picture view — aren’t deal-breakers for most people.
The Fire TV Stick 4K has the same processor as its non-4K siblings, but it’s only slightly slower than the 4K Max Ultra HD and in normal circumstances, we doubt you’ll notice any difference. It’s noticeably faster than the previous generation. Like all current Fire TV sticks, it has Alexa built-in, although the Stick models don’t have hands-free listening — you activate Alexa from the included remote. This is the version we’ve bought with our own money — it covers all the streaming essentials extremely well.
The Fire TV Stick 4K Max Ultra HD is the most powerful of all the Fire sticks: there’s a quad-core 1.8GHz processor, Dolby Atmos, 4K Ultra HD resolution and support for all the key formats: Dolby Vision, HDR 10, HDR10+, HLG and more. But the main draw here isn’t the marginally faster processor: it’s the Wi-Fi.
This is the only model in the current Fire TV range that supports Wi-Fi 6, which delivers smoother, more stable streaming than previous Wi-Fi standards. It’s backward compatible with previous Wi-Fi versions so you can use it now even if you haven’t got Wi-Fi 6 yet. If you already have a Wi-Fi 6 router or are likely to get one in the foreseeable future, this is the Fire TV stick to get.
How much is 4K worth? At Amazon, it seems the answer is not much. There's a very small difference in price between this, the full HD Fire TV Stick, and the 4K model. They’re otherwise almost identical — although this one has half a gigabyte less RAM, so may feel slightly slower than its 4K sibling. No 4K means no Dolby Vision, but there’s still Dolby Atmos for immersive sound.
This is the Fire TV stick to get if you have an HD TV and no plans to upgrade it in the foreseeable future: spending a tiny bit more on the 4K version would future-proof it — but then your next TV may well have all the apps you need pre-installed, with no need for a Fire TV stick at all.
If you want a Fire TV Stick for the lowest possible price, this is the stick you’re looking for. To achieve this ultra-low price Amazon has had to remove some of the features: in this case, it’s taken out the 4K, Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos support.
So clearly this isn’t a stick you’ll want for your state-of-the-art home cinema system or your OLED 4K TV but if you think of it as a cheap and cheerful way to make most standard definition TVs or HD TVs "smart" — for a tiny amount of money — then it makes a lot of sense.
Amazon’s most powerful Fire TV is too powerful to fit in a stick. Although its feature set is largely the same as the Fire TV Stick 4K Max it has twice the storage (16GB) and a much more powerful processor and GPU — a Hexa-core 2.2Ghz CPU and 800MHz GPU compared to the Fire TV Max’s 1.8GHz and 750MHz. There’s no Wi-Fi 6 but you do get MIMO for strong connections, live picture-in-picture and hands-free Alexa control that you can use to command other smart devices even when your TV is switched off.
This is the one for serious TV streamers, with support for Dolby Vision, HDR, HRD10+ and Dolby Atmos and the most processing power of any Fire TV.
