Roku Streaming Stick Plus Review: Cheap, Simple, and Pretty

Roku still has To disappoint me. When other brands modify the form factors, the interfaces and the product support with what may look like an alarming regularity even for initiates like me, Roku, with its rounded square interface, a pleasantly rubberous remote control and a joyfully simple plug-open stick design followed the course.

When the new Roku streaming Stick Plus arrived at home, I felt like it was 2012. This techno -optimism from the Obama era – will you remember that when social media was on the right side of history? – is still obvious. There are no huge boring advertisements at the top of everything in the menus, there is no harassment to love or subscribe to a funnel of owner data or others. Instead, you simply get a decent processor, a USB cable for food and a remote control that now has four quick buttons for the applications you could in fact subscribe – how SlingTV has ever obtained a dedicated place on a Roku remote control that I will never know.

Regarding quality, this 4K streaming device Offer everything you might need realistically without buying a disk player and starting a Blu-ray 4K collection. If you have $ 40 to lose and a slow television, buy one already.

Exceed

Photography: Parker Hall

There was once a time when players based on sticks like this, which are the size and shape of an old-fashioned USB key, could cause strange mounting problems depending on whether the television manufacturer had or not put his HDMI ports somewhere that had a real meaning. These days, the stick is easily plunged Each modern television that I testedWith a decent long USB cable that connects to the external USB port of the TV (also now mainly there) for power. This is a “configuration process” insofar as you know how to connect the cables to cable -shaped.

The remote control is what you interact most, and it’s fantastic as usual, a pill shape not sliding with familiar buttons that look like high quality pencil gum. Everything is standard Roku at this stage, until you realize that the applications listed for quick access at the bottom are actually good now: Disney +, Apple TV, Netflix and Amazon.

Now included in this level of the Roku device (previously, it was only available on more expensive models) is the vocal remote functionality, allowing you to use the microphone in the remote control to search for your favorite emissions and movies. It is a scandalously decent tool if you do not know where to broadcast something specific, and which is useful to me several times a year when I want a vacation or another.

Connection

With the kind authorization of Roku

It is really easy to connect to any application you subscribe to, and as easy to reorganize the tiles on the home screen so you don’t have to see things you don’t use. The configuration, including connection to Wi-Fi and installing an update of quick software, has taken about 10 minutes.