Bought a firestick after getting frustrated with my provided TV's

So the way things go here in Da Nang and I would imagine most other places in Vietnam where expats tend to live is that everywhere that you rent, well almost everywhere, comes fully-furnished by default. This is the first country that I have lived in that it is just standard that everything you would ever need, including cutlery, is just provided for you by the place that you are renting.

This is a double-edged sword though because even for places that are seen as being nice and that charge a premium for their location and perceived luxury, they don't really give you stuff that is any better than they absolutely must.

Almost all of the beds are uncomfortable, as are the sofas and all the chairs. The appliances are normally pretty good quality but there is one thing that it seems they always get budget versions of and that is the technology.

My TV's are Samsung, which was initially something that made me a bit excited when I first moved in here because most of the other places have some sort of Chinese brand that I have never heard of. That being the case, Samsung makes some trash stuff as well and two of those are in my apartment right now. They are technically "smart tv's" but they probably have the minimum requirements necessary to qualify as such. Anything that you would use in the menu such as apps to access netflix and what not, is painfully slow to the point where it just makes you want to not actually even watch TV.

I went through a period and am still going through it where I am spending a lot more time at home because of me not going out to pubs as often in my efforts to lose weight. After a few weeks of enduring the awful slow spinning wheel of loading death, A friend recommended I get a "firestick" which at that time in my life I didn't know what it was.

These are available on Lazada (or version of Amazon home deliver service here in Vietnam) for around $40 US. I was apprehensive to get involved but a friend of mine who I was explaining my issues to at a bowling outing made me a promise: If I didn't like it, he would buy it from me because he had another TV in his house he was considering upgrading anyway.

It was a genuine product, or if it isn't it is a very good copy. It was a little annoying that you are forced into opening an Amazon Prime account in order to use the thing in the capacity that I wanted to use it, but you are not obligated to actually pay for any of their premium services which is good, because I had no intention of doing so.

This is the part that is going to irritate people a bit and rightfully so. Amazon has activated a ton of privacy-invading aspects by default, and you have to explore the menu a bit in order to deactivate all of them. Since I was not familiar with the product, this took me some time fiddling about with the menu in order to deactivate all of them.

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The home menu by default is filled with various things that they are trying to get you to sign up and pay money for, so do yourself a favor and spend 20 minutes or so digging into the settings and deactivating all of these. you won't be able to completely get rid of them but you can make it customized so that the things you are actually going to use are the things that are featured prominently on this screen. For me I didn't want any of the pay services other than Netflix. I relegated most of the other things to the background where they will remain forever.

So after I disabled all of the advertising (which is ON by default - turn it off!) things ran a lot more smoothly.

You can talk to the remote because humanity is a bunch of retards that can't do anything using their brains and while I have played with that a little bit I am now just using the arrow buttons on the remote because I only use 2 things on mine: YouTube and Netflix. Maybe I'll want to add something later but at this point I don't care about any of them.

The best part about this $40 stick is that it runs completely independent of the TV's internal hardware, so I am no longer limited by the low-power of the cheap crap that is in my TV. What was previously a menu that loaded so slow it reminded me of dial-up internet (if you are old enough to remember that) is now lightning quick and immediate. It is now only limited by my internet connection and thankfully, despite my condo's rather sparse spending of money on anything else, we have really solid wifi as well as Ethernet connections behind every TV on the wall.

I don't watch more TV than I used to because of this, but I do spend a great deal more time not being frustrated by waiting 10 minutes for the damn menu to load and an additional amount of time every time I navigate to a new screen. Everything simply works!

The best part is that if I move or go on vacation this thing is roughly double the size of a USB stick and can easily go on vacation with me. This will come in handy because most of the time when you stay in hotels these days, even the nice places, the television is basically useless to the point where I question why they even bother putting them in there.

I don't buy a great many things because I am miserly with my money and that is why I have money... but this $40 contraption is definitely worth it, especially if you are like me and almost all the rest of the expats here and you don't own the things in your apartment.

it has been a game changer and if you are experiencing the same problems, I think it is money well spent