Amazon has been busy. Today, the company is launching a new Fire TV Stick HD – its slimmest streaming stick yet – along with the Ember Artline, a lifestyle TV that doubles as a piece of wall art and, notably, is a Freely TV.
On top of that, the long-awaited new Fire TV interface is finally getting a UK release date, and new free, ad-supported streaming channels (aff) are coming directly to the Fire TV live TV guide.
There’s quite a bit to get through, so let’s take it one thing at a time.
The New Fire TV Stick HD
The headline product for us is the new Fire TV Stick HD, which Amazon is pitching as its most portable streaming stick yet.
The most immediately obvious change is the size. The new HD stick is about 30% narrower than the previous generation, making it genuinely pocketable – useful if you travel and want to bring your streaming setup with you.
But the more practical day-to-day benefit is that it fits more easily behind your TV, taking up less space around the HDMI port and leaving room for other cables and plugs.
It also has a neat trick up its sleeve: it’s designed to run directly off your TV’s USB port, with no separate power adapter needed (much like the newer Roku sticks).
Most modern TVs have at least one USB port, so in many cases you’ll be able to plug the stick straight in and forget about it – no extra cable trailing to a wall socket.
That’s a small but welcome improvement for tidying things up behind the telly.
Amazon says the new stick is more than 30% faster than the previous HD model when it comes to turning on and opening apps.
Looking at the spec sheet, the processor seems to be the same as before – a quad-core 1.7 GHz chip – so the speed gains are likely down to software and OS optimisation rather than a hardware leap.
In practice, though, faster is faster, and the old HD stick could feel sluggish at times.
The rest of the specs are what you’d expect at this price point: 8GB of storage, Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.3, and a…