We have a smart TV, but we’re discovering that not all the smart apps work all that well with the TV. It’s gotten to the point where the apps are not all that dependable anymore. The TV has to be rebooted for some of them to work – it’s just a pain in the …. well, you get the idea.There is Roku, and Chrome Cast and all sorts of devices at price points all over the board. I accidently discovered this one day while just searching the likes of Amazon. A Google-certified streaming player, with remote, Chromecast & voice assistant. This peaked my interested. At $60 retail, it seemed like a pretty good deal. Ordered and received in a few days.You get a small white box, an HDMI cable, a power brick & a remote. The remote takes 2x AAA batteries (not included). Connecting the box to my HDMI switcher was easy enough. Plug it in, turn the TV & device on and you are greeting with the initial setup screens. Along the way, you’ll have to enter in your Google credentials and any respective logins to any streaming services free or subscription based. This took a little bit as I had to retrieve credentials for some of those. I did go into the settings and ensure that the display resolution was set correctly. Although it is capable of streaming 4k, responsiveness was a little sluggish, so I kept it set at 1080p, which is good for most things. Network is wired (100mb – max) or wireless. If you plan to use this a lot, it would be highly recommended to use a wired network so as to not congest the wireless side of things.The voice recognition works pretty well. You simply press the gray microphone button at the top of the remote and speak what you want to search for. The device will attempt to search across all the platforms you setup and tell you where you can find that show/movie. I tried this with a number of different searches, some were better than other. Some searches forgot to search on some platforms. Your results may vary. Overall, it wasn’t bad.We’ve used Chromecast in our house for quite a while and will sometimes stream from our phone or computer to the TV. This device has that functionality built in – no need to buy a separate device. And, this works pretty well. In YouTube for instance, click on the stream button and if both devices are on the same network, you should be able to stream that feed to the TV. I did this with both devices on the same wireless network and this worked pretty well too.You are able to install more apps into the device, but only those that the device says it supports. Its strength are media type apps with a limited support for games. Overall, I’m pretty happy with this device. It has a lot to offer, has a lot of functionality and is priced competitively. The only complaint I have is that the LAN connection is only 100M – I wish this was 1-gig. Most anything now-a-days that has a built-in LAN port supports 1-gig. I had very few stuttering issues, and generally that was due to switching from one stream to another. The responsiveness was pretty snappy and a nice user interface. And, this device is more apt to keep the apps up-to-date vs. our TV.

SO most TVs these days are some sort of smart TV. Now if you dont like the operating system it uses or have a TV that is not smart then this is the device for you. It connects to your TV and allows you to stream movies, play games, download apps and much more. It has a voice activated remote that is one of the better I have bused. Some of the voice remotes are terrible. You can also use the remote as a normal one which I find useful because who really wants to say channel up, or volume down every time while scrolling through channels trying to find something to watch or get to the right volume. The picture is clear and wireless connecting it to my internet was fast and simple. It never lost connection and does support the 5 ghz frequency which is good for the speed and less interference than 2.4 which a lot of products only do support. If you use an android phone this device basically makes your TV a large phone. I wanted this because I cant stand the TCL Roku interface and like the google one much better and this did just that with keeping the Netflix and Prime shortcut buttons on the remote. This one also has a shortcut to YouTube which is pretty neat as I do frequent that a lot as well. Sound is good as its Dolby digital plus, not Dolby's newest but more than capable of reproducing some immersive sound. One other thing that I liked is that trying to get my TCL Roku to connect to my Chromebook was a nightmare, it really cant be done that easy without some other device................like this one. This made it almost fool proof without having to download this and that and scan this and wait for 5 minutes, nope it was plug and play and now I can cast my Chromebook to my TCL. There are other devices like this out there but speaking from first hand experience with this one I dont think you could get better performance, features, and with google certifications without spending at least double.

Very easy to install and understand seems to give all that it promises. Excellent for those who don’t understand streaming