stolen got me the Amazon Fire TV Gamers bundle for Christmas and it can easily suck me in for hours on end. For a hundred buck you too can have all the delights of Netflix, Hulu Plus and Amazon’s own Prime Instant Video.

We have an Apple TV that’s been the hub of our entertainment but there were a couple of things missing: the Prime Instant Video and games, games, games.

I have a suspicion that Amazon hasn’t and won’t build their video app for other platforms simply because they want people to buy their own hardware instead. Sure the video app is on iOS for iPhone and other tiny handhelds but who wants to watch movies on a screen that can fit in your pocket? Nobody who cares about movies.

Asphalt 8: Airborne is everything you’d want from a racer and Deus Ex: The Fall on our big screen was just as addicting as when I played the original on the PC back in 2001. Check out Ars’ 15 games worth playing on Amazon’s Fire TV for more games to get. I’d also bet as more and more developers realize the potential, more and more great games will be built and ported.

Both the Apple TV and Fire TV are under a $100 so if you want the best entertainment that the online world has to offer, you can’t go wrong with either. And don’t bother with the streaming sticks, get a hockey puck device.

In related news, Amazon Prime members get free, unlimited photo storage with their subscription along with free streaming of millions of songs.

I want to use them both, I really do. After the iCloud bullshit I’ve been looking for a solid replacement for cloud storage of our music and photos.

Amazon Cloud Drive is pretty sweet for viewing in the browser and the mobile apps but it’s utterly ridiculous that there isn’t a standalone Mac app to sync my stuff up to their cloud. I’m not going to use a browser to manually upload new files or navigate around on both sides to update files that have changed. Fail.

Prime music also looks pretty sweet. You can listen via the browser and the mobile apps of course but the standalone Mac app is one slow piece of shit. Seriously, it’s worse than iTunes in how slow the fucker is. When I search for an artist or song, I see a spinner (not the pinwheel but Amazon’s version). For real. A native app on my computer searching for music on my computer and the app has to think about it. Fail two.

I realize that companies, the internet, the world at large are all moving to mobile apps but c’mon — there’s literally millions of people that still use their notebooks and desktops to do their computing.

In conclusion… there never may be the computing nirvana that I seek but we’re leaps and bounds from when I used to hook up a Linux desktop to our TV and force the family to watch movies complete with the horrible pink (not black) banding.

#amazon #firetv