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Comment by Zelphyr | Hacker News Reader

Everything Amazon does with the Fire product line I find to be terrible. The Kindle Paperwhite is a delight to use but the Fire is beyond frustrating and, often as not, feels like a device designed for the sole purpose of parting me with my money on Amazon other products.

My 7 year old got a Kids Kindle Fire. I have 20+ years software engineering experience yet I have more trouble trying to do the most basic things with that device. Its infuriating.

We got the Fire TV Stick figuring it would be a good alternative to the Roku. Its not. Most of the time it couldn't keep a connection to wifi.

I don't know what Amazon is thinking but, in my opinion, their reputation is suffering badly because of their handling of the Fire product line. I know personally I will never buy another Fire product.

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I've got a kids kindle fire with their free time service for my 6 year old and couldn't agree more. The software and ui are terrible. Worse in some cases than their older fire devices. My son was trying to install a couple of apps yesterday and the progress bar got to 100% and then stalled. The little X on the icons to cancel the process didn't work and a reboot didn't help. The apps weren't in the list of installed apps or anywhere else. I ended up having to block them from his profile and then unblock them before they would reset in the UI. Then we downloaded them one at a time which seemed to work. I spent a good 20 minutes trying to find a way to do this. This is just one small example of the frustrations we've had with the device and all of them stem from the poor user experience and confusing choices they've made.

I'm also not impressed with the fire sticks. I don't own any myself but a friend bought four on a whim. He's called me at least a dozen times asking for help with figuring out why they've mysteriously stopped working. It's usually just that the wifi has dropped which happens all the time. Other times it's because his DSL from AT&T is terrible and has reset while he was streaming something and then the device is apparently locked out of any Amazon content most likely due to copyright protection restrictions but the error is just "Video player error this content is currently unavailable." If he swaps devices he can pick up where he left off but that one device is locked out of everything from Amazon for an unknown amount of time while other apps work perfectly.

I like AWS but most of their hardware and other software is terrible.

The Fire TV stick is the best $ I've spent on a TV device. I love it - fast, responsive, does not drop connections, and has all the apps I want.

I've used Boxee, Google TV, Roku, Chromecast, and (XMBC on Raspberry Pi) and none of those compare to the FireTV stick. It blows them out of the water.

Boxee was my favorite until the team building it deserted it

One nice thing about the Roku is that it searches across multiple apps for content. The Amazon TV devices put Amazon content front and center, making you think you have to buy a video when you already have access to it via Netflix without having to pay more.

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