Gadgetory

on the outside Amazon's fire TV looks a lot like the streaming players from Apple and Roku but it's what's on the inside that really counts I'm Bill Detweiler and this is cracking open following in the footsteps of the Apple TV and the streaming players from Roku the fire TV is a small black box it's four and a half inches square and just over half an inch thick there's really nothing much to see on the front and sides of the box but along the back you'll find a bevy of connectors there's a power Jack HDMI port optical audio port Ethernet jack and even a USB slot the fire TVs remote is pretty similar to the competition with one big difference it has a microphone that viewers can use with the players voice search feature opening the fire TV is ridiculously simple using a thin tool or screwdriver carefully pop loose the plastic tabs holding the base to the upper shell and then gently separate the two now that we're inside we can see the box's circuit board the board is attached to a large heatsink with no less than 10 Phillips screws the heatsink in turn is attached to the plastic case with adhesive now after removing the screws you can lift out the board leaving the zinc aluminum heatsink in place once we remove the metal shields from the circuit board our fire TV teardown is complete and we can turn our attention to the remote after removing the battery cover and a few more Phillips screws you can gently pry apart the case now there's a bit of glue along the bottom edge so you'll want to take care not to crack the housing or damage any of the internal components in the process the circuit board is held to the upper half of the housing with several additional screws and once you've removed them the board and button pad can come out now a special note on the board are the microphone and the voice processor now with both the fire TV and its remote in pieces this cracking open is a wrap so how does amazon's $99 box up against the competing players from Apple and Roku well the fire TV has a quad core 1.7 gigahertz crate 300 processor and Adreno 320 GPU 2 gigs of ram and 8 gigs of internal storage in contrast the Apple TV has a single core Apple a5 sauk 512 Meg's of RAM and 8 gigs of storage the Roku 3 does have a dual core a non processor but like the Apple TV it only has 512 Meg's of RAM the fire TV definitely wins out when it comes to hardware and the voice enhanced remote is a cool feature but having better hardware will only get you so far when it comes to streaming media players the real value is in the content which often comes down to a personal preference more so than a cut and dry decision the fire TV supports third-party apps like Netflix Hulu Plus and Pandora but its interface favours content from Amazon Instant which shouldn't really be a surprise given that this is Amazon's box now for more information on the fire TV including an extensive look at the user interface and content offerings check out the full CNET review to see more teardown photos and read my full hardware analysis go to TechRepublic comm forward slash cracking open I am bill Detweiler thanks for watching