It doesn't take much time with Amazon's new Fire TV Stick and Fire TV Stick Lite to understand what they're all about. The $40 third-generation Fire TV Stick is an overdue upgrade to Amazon's best-selling streaming player, replacing its four-year-old processor with one that's much faster. The $30 Fire TV Stick Lite, meanwhile, is a naked attempt to achieve price parity with Roku's budget Express streamer, with the same performance as the standard Stick but a major compromise to its remote control: There are no TV volume or power buttons onboard. Of the two, the Fire TV Stick is much easier to recommend than the Lite version. I've said it before, but having TV controls built into the remote really is worth the extra $10. Whether the new Fire TV Sticks are worth buying over other budget streamers is harder to say, because Amazon is preparing a major software overhaul for later this year.

The Amazon Fire TV Stick has just been treated to an upgrade, pushing the best cheap streaming device on the market even further ahead of the competition. It was launched in the US some time ago, but has only just come to the UK, and brings with it a number of improvements that make it well worth buying, even if you already own an Amazon Fire TV Stick. Its headline feature is support for Alexa, Amazon's excellent voice assistant. This doesn't just enable users to track down TV shows, films and apps much, much faster than ever just by speaking to the voice-controlled remote, but also to accurately control playback without having to fiddle with any buttons. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph.

Amazon is bringing its voice assistant to British television screens with the latest edition of its popular Fire TV stick. The £40 ($50) stick that transforms any TV screen into a streaming device will now come with Alexa - the female helper from Amazon Echo. The update will let viewers quickly search for content and rewind programmes using only their voice. Viewers can speak to the bot through an in-built microphone on the device's remote control TV viewers will be able to speak to Alexa through a microphone built into the device's remote control. The bot will be able to understand entertainment-specific commands such as'skip back 10 minutes' and'find suspense thrillers'.

Amazon is bringing the next generation of its excellent Fire TV Stick to the UK, updating the device with Alexa, expanded voice search capabilities and a new user interface. The addition of Alexa support is undoubtedly the most notable upgrade. The artificial intelligence assistant is widely recognised as the best in the game, powering Amazon's Echo speakers, and is set to land on a range of new product categories in the near future, including cars, phones, fridges and TVs. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar. Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' performs during its unveiling in Tokyo, Japan Singulato Motors co-founder and CEO Shen Haiyin poses in his company's concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China A picture shows Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo.

Before Amazon's second-generation Fire TV Stick showed up for review, I thought it could be the cheap streaming device to beat. Amazon has claimed a 30 percent performance boost over the original Fire TV Stick, whose biggest problem was sluggishness. Apps took a long time to load, and were prone to bouts of freezing and stuttering. The device didn't seem built to last in an age of increasingly sophisticated streaming apps such as Sling TV and PlayStation Vue. The 2016 Fire TV Stick--still priced at $40--alleviates those issues, but it doesn't completely solve them.

Amazon has announced a new version of its Fire TV Stick, a compact streaming dongle that's a direct rival to Google's Chromecast. The new streaming device comes with improved hardware, a more affordable price and will ship starting this October. The new Amazon Fire TV Stick comes with a 1.3GHz quad-core Cortex-A7 processor along with the Mali-450MP4 GPU. Amazon claims that the new hardware should make the new dongle 30 percent faster than its predecessor. As for connectivity, it comes with 802.11ac

When Amazon first launched the Fire TV Stick in late 2014, it almost seemed too good to be true. The thumb-sized device promised more power than the latest Roku box and a better app selection than Apple TV at less than half the price of either. It was only a little pricier than Google's Chromecast dongle, yet it managed to include a proper remote control and on-screen interface. Despite some early launch bugs and quirks, it was a great way to make your TV smarter on the cheap. Cut to 2016, and the competition has gotten tougher.