Amazon Fire Stick

Terrysdelight

Hi

My son is at Uni - he doesn't have a TV with him but he has his laptop. Would a firestick be useful for him - I don't know exactly what it is for. He does have good wifi.

Amazon have them on sale for £29.99 and I don't know if this is a good price.

Many thanks
Terrysdelight

Undervalued

Not really!

A Fire stick (excellent by the way) is intended to plug in to a non smart TV to give it smart functions and access things like BBC iPlayer and of course Amazon Prime.

He can do all of that with his laptop.

sal_III

Absolutely useless for a laptop. Somewhat useful if he has external display to plug the stick in.

And if it's not a 4k display/TV you might as well go for the cheaper stick for £19.99

Terrysdelight

Undervalued wrote: »

Not really!

A Fire stick (excellent by the way) is intended to plug in to a non smart TV to give it smart functions and access things like BBC iPlayer and of course Amazon Prime.

He can do all of that with his laptop.

Thank you. That's what I was wondering.

neilmcl

As above the Amazon Fire Stick, or any HDMI streaming stick will not work on a laptop as a laptop's HDMI is for output only.

Terrysdelight

neilmcl wrote: »

As above the Amazon Fire Stick, or any HDMI streaming stick will not work on a laptop as a laptop's HDMI is for output only.

OK, thank you. For some reason my son didn't want to take his TV, which is, a smart TV, so I guess a Fire Stick is absolutely pointless for him.

Carrot007

Undervalued wrote: »

A Fire stick (excellent by the way) is intended to plug in to a non smart TV

I would say it is intended to plug into something with HDMI in.


This could include a laptop, but they are very rare. And let's face it with a laptop you are better off with the native apps / web anyway.


And nothing stopping you pluging it into a smart tv. And many reasons people may want to.

neilmcl

TBH, there's absolutely no need to use the Amazon stick on a laptop. He'll be able to get access to Amazon Prime, BBC Iplaye, Netflix etc from the laptop's browser.

SuperSeagull

I am thinking of buying a firestick but my old Panasonic TV does not have HDMI ports as they are not working. Repair man wanted £250 to collect and repair them. However I use my laptop on the tv via VGA could I therefore buy a female hdmi to male vga adaptor as advertised on the intenet for a few pounds and plug the firestick into that. Would it work.

DoaM

UGREEN say that it can be done. This is one of theirs on Amazon. Cheaper variants may be available.

almillar

could I therefore buy a female hdmi to male vga adaptor as advertised on the intenet for a few pounds and plug the firestick into that. Would it work.

I'd rather save for a new TV...