Roku’s latest streaming stick is great, but the latest OS update has flaws

Roku has actually modified its OS with the newest replace and I’ve been utilizing the brand new Streaming Stick Plus to check them each out. General, there are some good enhancements, however they appear to come back at the price of among the simplicity that made Roku so particular within the first place.

Streaming Stick Plus

There’s not so much to say concerning the new streaming stick that hasn’t been mentioned. Roku has been making incredible reasonably priced good TV sticks since I began on this beat six years in the past and the identical is true right now. The Plus mannequin I’m testing is pretty priced at $50 and can play all of the high-end content material from any main streamer.

out of the field that is what the Dwelling Display screen is like.

This mannequin caps out at 4K HDR10+ so there’s no Dolby Imaginative and prescient assist, however actually, it’s not one thing anybody searching for a Roku Stick Plus ought to care about. In the event you don’t care sufficient to know what Dolby Imaginative and prescient is, you most likely aren’t seeking to get one in every of these. That mentioned, I do know what Dolby Imaginative and prescient is and I don’t care. HDR10+ and Dolby Imaginative and prescient are just about equivalent and each look extraordinary. Except you’re evaluating them side-by-side you received’t discover a distinction.

In the event you’re like me and run a Plex server, you’ll be glad to know that this little machine holds up decently properly. After I tried streaming a 4K HDR Blu-ray rip of Interstellar with a median bitrate of 56mbps, the Streaming Stick Plus virtually acquired the job finished. Monitoring the playback on my server, the video would even peak at bitrates round 96mbps. The video held up for about an hour earlier than crashing out, however this received’t be a problem for the common particular person streaming 4K from Netflix and Applt TV+.

The distant is similar as at all times, which is to say it feels first rate, it’s mild and the button structure is kind of easy. There’s no headphone jack on this distant although so if you’d like that you should improve. The most important change on the stick is that it lastly takes energy over USB-C. However don’t fear it comes with a USB-C to USB-A cable within the field so it’s simple to run off your TV’s built-in USB ports because it solely attracts round 2.5 watts of energy.

What 4K Roku stick must you get?

There are 4 choices: the Roku Categorical (4K), the Roku Streaming Stick Plus, the Roku Streaming Stick 4K, and at last, the Roku Extremely.

In my eyes, there are solely two actual choices now: the Streaming Stick Plus, and, in case you actually care about specs and need to be hardwired in, the Roku Extremely. In the event you actually need the distant with the headphone jack, it’s also possible to purchase it individually.

RokuOS

That is how the house display screen appears whenever you flip all of the extras off.

That is the actual improve I used to be enthusiastic about, however sadly it’s let me down.

To begin with, there are a ton of latest sub-sections within the sidebar that I wanted to disable. I discover issues like beneficial channels and stay TV distracting and I needed to dive into the settings to disable them. As soon as I did, the Roku residence display screen went again to the way in which it was once.

I desire this as a result of it’s simple and one thing I’ve discovered individuals of all ages can study tremendous simply. Including all this further stuff isn’t inherently dangerous, but it surely erodes one in every of Roku’s conventional strengths of simplicity.

The subsequent difficulty is with the brand new Backdrops characteristic. That is alleged to be a extra refined screensaver expertise for the system, however as an alternative, it’s a very janky app that’s not even constructed into the OS.

To get it, you should seek for Backdrops within the Streaming Retailer. Then you possibly can set up it, and as soon as inside there are a ton of superior high-resolution artwork choices, a sensible system for customizing your choices and even the power to load a customized album proper from Google Pictures. It’s good, besides you should manually flip them on which defeats the entire function of a screensaver.

Artwork appears nice on fashionable TVs.

There’s a little shortcut on the prime of the app residence display screen, but it surely’s actually insane that this isn’t constructed into the common screensaver performance. I’ll say one good perk of those backgrounds is that the Roku stick routinely detected that my TV was OLED and set the background rotation to each 5 minutes to stop burn-in.

General, it looks like these work extra flawlessly on Roku TVs and never as properly on the streaming sticks, which is a disgrace. If Apple could make it work with the Apple TV and the Roku Metropolis screensaver performs on a regular basis then I’m certain the corporate can determine this out.