hey everybody it’s lon seidman we’re taking a look today at walmart’s streaming stick this is their on full hd streaming stick and this is running android right now it is selling for 15 definitely the lowest priced android tv on the market and because it’s kind of a name brand it actually is fairly functional and we’re going to take a look at what you can and can’t do with this streaming stick in just a second but i do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure that my wife bought this for me at walmart the other day all the opinions you’re about to hear are my own no one is paying for this review nor has anyone reviewed or approved what you’re about to see before it was uploaded so let’s get into it now and see what this stick is all about now this is designed for 1080p television sets the target i would say are older televisions that maybe had some smart functionality or maybe didn’t and you want to get netflix and other apps on them this will do that quite well if you have a 4k television they do sell a 4k streaming device it’s a little box that we reviewed a few weeks ago that cost maybe 10 or 15 dollars more but if you have an older set that is running at 1080p or even 720p i think this one will do just fine this will work on a 4k tv but you won’t get the resolution that that tv can deliver you do of course get a remote in the box here they’ve got some sold real estate down here some quick buttons for youtube netflix hbo and disney plus it also supports the google assistant that will demo in a few minutes and the remote is a bluetooth remote so it doesn’t have to be in line of sight with the stick but it also has an ir blaster on here so if you do have an older television you can control the power and volume with this remote so you can put your other remote away if you intend on using this as your main device to watch tv and that was a nice touch to have on the remote they also give you an extension cable in the box so if you have a hard time fitness behind your television you can plug it into this cable here and that’s what i was doing earlier then you can kind of have it dangle off the back of the set now one thing i want to point out is the power up plug on it so you do of course get your little power
adapter in the box it’s a standard usb power supply you could also plug it into your television’s usb port if it has one and of note here is that the portion that plugs into the device itself is a little longer than we typically see on a generic usb cable and for that reason i was not able to get some of my other accessories plugged into this and test them so i have a little ethernet device that allows you to use it over a wired network and because my ethernet device doesn’t have a nice long plug like this i couldn’t get it to work all right so we got everything booted up now this is your standard android tv interface nothing fancy here it is a little on the slower side it is powered by an am logic s805y processor uh this is a lower end chip versus some of the more expensive tv boxes out there and it only has one gigabyte of ram but this is fine for 1080p video playback so some of your apps might take a little bit longer to load but once you get into them it’s not going to take you too long to go through and find something to watch and i’m finding as i’ve been playing with this thing that video playback is just fine these chips are not that fast but they are well suited for video decoding which is their primary activity so i don’t think you’ll have any real performance issues doing the things that this is designed for but again you will see some sluggishness here as you’re moving about the interface but as i mentioned video playback is just fine on this device i’ve got a video here playing back from my youtube channel at 1080p 60.
It’s not dropping any frames it’s able to keep up with everything and it looks fine so if you are just looking for a basic playback device here this is going to work well on an older television i haven’t found anything that gives me any cause for concern and it looks like it supports most if not all of the popular streaming services out there you can get to the app library just by going into the app section here and that will bring you over to the google play store and you can go in and find what you’re looking for what’s nice is that because this is running android the library of apps that are available for it is quite extensive and there are also games that you can play on here too let’s take a look at one of those and i’m going to pair up my xbox controller to the device over bluetooth so here’s a game that i pulled down from the google play store it’s called subdivision infinity it’s a little space shooter game and it seems to run just fine on here and a lot of games that you’ll find in the store will run pretty nicely also because those games are targeted for lower end devices they’ve got a few that run on just the remote and others that require a game controller but because this supports bluetooth you can attach just about any bluetooth game controller to it wirelessly and that bluetooth also works for private listening if you want to use bluetooth headphones now i did try to get the 3dmark benchmark suite to work on here so we can measure how it stands up against other devices unfortunately i could not get any of the benchmarks to run on here likely because it doesn’t have much memory on board another limitation is that it doesn’t have much storage on board only eight gigabytes and of that you might have maybe five gigabytes or so left after the operating system to
install more apps and it’s only running android 9 which is an older version of the android operating system i would not anticipate them bringing this up to a more current version so i think if you are looking at this thing for games there’s probably better ones out there this one is really going to be limited to streaming applications in my opinion but it does do pretty well with game streaming i have it running on the geforce now service here for this demo but you could also run something like moonlight in your home to stream from a gaming pc in a different room it looks pretty good it plays pretty good too using my bluetooth controller here not as good as the experience might be on a more expensive device like the nvidia shield or something but if you are on a budget with a low end television you can connect up to one of these services like geforce now or google stadia and be able to play some of these games here provided you have a decent wi-fi connection to your streaming stick now on the remote you’ll notice that there is a google assistant button and you can ask it to do things with your voice so for example i can say show me star trek the next generation and you’ll notice there that i pause after i push the button because it does take
it a little bit of time to load up the assistant and get ready for my voice so if you push the button and start talking it’s only going to hear about half of what you ask it to do so just be aware of that it does seem to work with many of the google assistant functions i did ask it to show me my security cameras i have wise cameras up all over the house it was not able to do that even though other tv devices that i’ve looked at can do that and that might be a limitation of either its memory or the fact that it’s running android 9 but i did get it to turn my lights on and off and whatnot just by asking it through the remote so you do have some voice capability here you just need to pause for a second before you ask it a question now it also works as a chromecast now right now i’ve got netflix here loaded up on my iphone and what you’ll see is a little icon that looks like this under my finger here and if i tap on that i will be able to connect to my on tv stick here and i can start playing back media from my phone on the television so you can see that i was able to load the netflix app up just by tapping on that button and if i go here once netflix is loaded and click on play what will happen is is that i can actually send media from my phone to the television so it’s going to make that connection now and then i can start playing back cobra kai here for example and it should start up playing here once it catches up again this is
another area where the speed of the device will be a bit of an issue but it’s starting to play i even have playback controls here so i can pause it from the phone and then resume it so if you were watching something on your commute you could toss it to your television when you get inside and this functions identically to how google’s own chromecast devices function and this one appears to be about half the price of the basic chromecast now i know a lot of you follow me for my coverage of plex here on the channel and a full disclosure plex is an occasional sponsor here plex is a personal media server so you can load up a bunch of media on a computer or nas device in your home and then serve that to all of your televisions and it works fine here on the on streaming stick i was able to play back a bunch of my blu-ray movies that i have stored on that server those play back just fine at 1080p one thing to note though is that it was not switching into 24p mode automatically even though i enabled that feature that’s an issue i see with a lot of these low end players so just be aware of that but on a cheap tv your movies will play back just fine over the network i also tried hd home run which is my over-the-air network tv tuner that i use here in the house and in full disclosure they are also an occasional sponsor here uh that worked fine as well it was able to de-interlace 1080i content successfully
and it also worked with drm content on my cable system so it looks like this is a full-on android tv device in a very inexpensive package so there’s not much more to say on this device other than if you are looking for a low-cost but functional android tv device this is the one to get it works great for what it is and i think if you’ve got an old dumb 1080p set that you want to have running android tv there’s really nothing better out there than this thing at the moment and what i like about it is that the price of it is even less than one of the entry-level chromecasts out there so it’s something that i think is well worth investigating if you are looking for a very inexpensive way to add android tv to a television in your home that is going to do it for now until next time this is lon seidman thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by the london tv supporters including gold level supporters jim tannis and tom albrecht hot sauce and video games and eric’s variety channel brian parker and frank goldman amda brown and matt zagaya and chris allegretta if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to lawn dot tv support to learn more and don’t forget to subscribe
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