Amazon launches Fire TV Stick in UK for just(hdmi wireless)

Five months after it was launched in the US, Amazon has finally brought its Fire TV Stick to the UK for just 35. The tiny device streams video via Netflix, Amazon Prime and YouTube, among others, straight to your television.

For the first two days existing Amazon Prime subscribers can order the gadget for 19. The first devices will ship to customers on April 15.

These tiny streamers,hdmi wireless about the size of a pack of chewing gum, plug directly into an HDMI socket and offer almost all of the same features for much less money.

So in November the company responded with the Fire TV Stick in the US. It was a cut down version of the Fire TV in thumb sized format. The original Fire TV, for contrast, still costs more than twice as much: 79.

With a dual core processor, 1GB of RAM and a separate GPU the Stick can screen full HD video and even games; not top of the range games, admittedly, but the same sort of thing you would play on a smartphone.

I had a go at Flappy Birds on a huge television and it was good fun, if a little dizzying, watching huge pixels zoom across the screen.

The device uses the same Fire OS as its larger relative, which is what Google Android becomes after Amazon engineers have tweaked and morphed it to their liking.

It quite a slick interface to use and the extra processing power in the Stick compared to more basic rivals means that it not at all laggy. It up there with Apple TV and a world apart from the older Roku streaming stick I use at home where loading an app can take several seconds.

A clever feature called ASAP also starts buffering data on the films or programmes that it thinks you about to start watching, to avoid any delay after pressing play. Hover over Games of Thrones and start reading the episode description and it jump into action and start downloading the first few seconds before you even decide to press play.

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You get the usual suspects in terms of third party apps: Netflix, iPlayer and YouTube. But the main draw will be Amazon Prime, which is understandably front and centre on the device UI.

In fact, there little logic in choosing a Stick if you not a Prime subscriber it a good service, but one that promoted so heavily in the Fire OS that if you just using Netflix it makes sense to shop elsewhere.

One smart touch is that if you order your Fire Stick through Amazon's website your device will arrive already logged in to Prime. That makes it properly plug and play.

Perhaps the biggest virtue of this small device is portability you could imagine throwing it in your luggage when you travelling for work and having all of your content on the big screen rather than a tablet. Amazon cleverly made sure that it works with those awful proprietary menus found on hotel televisions.

It a very clean design; there no box to find a place for on the shelf, no wires to snake through the furniture. Just pop it into a spare HDMI socket, and a USB socket or power plug, and you off (HDMI can handle sound and video on one wire, but can provide power).

The matt plastic box isn going to win any design awards, but that OK, as you should only ever see it when you install it or dust behind the TV.

So what of the downsides? The remote on the Fire TV has a microphone for speech search, which is missing on the Stick remote. But you can choose to control it instead with a smartphone app, where the built in microphone offers this feature.

That app will also be of use on the days when the tiny remote is lost somewhere down the sofa (the similarly diminutive Apple TV remote has been AWOL in my home for many weeks).