Just two days ago, Roku announced their new lineup of media center devices, and today Amazon has made public their latest Fire TV Stick. If you are unfamiliar with Amazon's hardware offerings, the Fire TV Stick is their competitor to the Chromecast (even to the point of Amazon removing Chromecast listings from their store). But unlike the Chromecast, and similar to the recently-announced Roku Express, all applications run directly on the device. The Fire TV stick also has a sizable game library, which is certainly unique at the price point.The updated Fire TV Stick is a major improvement in almost every way. The CPU has seen a major upgrade from the first generation's dual-core ARM Cortex A9. It is now powered by the quad-core Mediatek 8127D, the same chipset found in the Amazon Fire tablet. It has the same 8GB internal storage and 1GB of RAM as the original, but makes the jump from Bluetooth 3.0 to 4.1. The device can also decode H.265 video, no doubt future-proofing for future streaming and media support. Finally, 802.11ac WiFi support has been added.On the software side, the new Fire TV Stick is running the same Fire OS 5 that other Fire devices run on, a modified version of Android 5.0 Lollipop. The biggest improvement is the addition of Alexa, Amazon's voice assistant. You can open applications, ask queries similar to Google Now, and control other Fire TV functions easily. To facilitate this, the new Fire TV Stick has a redesigned remote with a microphone button.Overall, this is a much-needed improvement from the first generation, and if you don't mind the Amazon ecosystem it is a solid option. You can pre-order it right now, and it will go on sale October 20.

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Source: Amazon listingFire TV Device Specifications