Mine came in Friday, I had the weekend to play with it. I’m a Plex Pass Member and was looking for a change from my Roku 3’s GUI. The Plex app is based off the Home Theater / Google TV offerings. It works well as a Plex client, lots of additional eye candy. I installed Pandora, TuneIn, Crackle and few others. The Amazon part of the box works great, you click on a video and it’s almost instantly playing. The search feature also works nice, but it only works with Hulu Plus and Amazon’s content. It’s basically a kindle for your TV, I also played with casting from my Motorola Xoom and that worked flawless so you get the added benefit of a Chromecast too. I didn’t try to play anything from my iPad or iPhone yet. I have the Chromecast app installed on both, but didn’t think to try it.
The downside is the remote not being IR, but to get that mic to work I guess you had to use a digital connection to the device. I noticed that an USB IR and a remote with keys mapped is supposed to work too. I got some of it working, but have yet to program my Harmony touch. I didn’t see an app for just controlling the fire in the app store (yet). I also have an HDPrime and wanted to use the app they developed. I guess for now I’ll use my Roku 3 and the HDHRFling app as the store says it’s incompatible.
I’ve been fooling around with MythTV and might side load XBMC to use the PVR client. I also read that you can change the Amazon OS if wanted. Run something staraight from Google(TV), you need to use the dev tools provided by Google and a load that up from a PC. Because it’s Android you have options to hack the device.
It’s a pretty cool toy, 99$ isn’t going to break the bank either.
–JB
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