Android TV Stick 4K HDR – I96 D1 Model 10.0 Streaming Stick | Dual-Band WiFi 5 | Voice Remote | 2GB RAM 16GB Storage | Fire TV Stick Alternative | Streaming Device

Smooth streaming if left playing but it is frequently plagued by buffering
[For the sake of transparency, I received this item for free through the Amazon Vine programme on condition that I leave an honest review. I give this review honestly and the fact that I did not pay for this item has not influenced my rating]The stick looks like most other Android TV sticks. Hooking it up to your TV or monitor is simple enough where you need a powered USB port to power the stick. The stick wouldn’t show up initially under Google Home as it instructed though I was able to add my account and connect it to my WiFi manually. With that said, the process is tedious and laborious with the remote. Thankfully, logging into YouTube and Prime Video were pain-free using the QR code.The remote looks smart but it isn’t all that crisp when pushing buttons down, just mushy and often slow to respond so sometimes you overshoot the menus. Batteries aren’t mentioned in the item description but you will need a pair of AAA batteries as they’re not included with this stick.Upon digging into the hardware, in addition to the Allwinner H313 SoC (this was mid-range in TV sticks/set top boxes 5 years ago) is a rather paltry 2GB of RAM along with 16GB of eMMC storage, which is expandable via MicroSD.The YouTube app played back content reasonbly but was often slow with buffering. My biggest gripe with it was how wasteful the interface of the app is on this device. Even with a 1080p resolution, icons, text and thumbnails are so large in the menu, it looks like it was running on 480p with no scaling to put more items on the screen.Prime Video was very mixed. When I watched content through it, I could stream very smoothly. There is one big caveat, however. The smooth streaming is entirely contingent on you not pausing for long period. When you pause for more than 2 or 3 minutes, 9 out of 10 times resuming playback elicits more buffering that throws an error message (without an error code) with an apparent timeout. Sometimes, you would advised to return to the Home menu, re-open Prime Video and playing back your chosen content. Unfortunately, the buffering problem persists so you are effectively forced to do a soft restart or turn the stick on and off again, which does resolve the buffering problem so I suspect there is a chronic buffer overflow at play with what little RAM there is. I also reckon the sluggish eMMC storage may have a role in this buffering problem as disk caching won’t be particularly quick.Unfortunately, this problem was also observed in Netflix and Disney Plus where persistent buffering forced a restart after pausing play on content. In one app, I may call that a bad implementation that happens to be a one-off but when I see it on two apps by different developers, I can’t call that a coincidence.I found the factory-installed MX Player app to actually be rather good with video playback from a MicroSDHC card. Whether the videos were 4K60 or in a .mkv container, they played back without any cause for complaint.What’s my conclusion? In short, it’s a serious disappointment due to the persitent buffering issues that require a restart, really hindering my user experience. Seeing that this product is touted as an Amazon Fire HD Stick lternative, I’d draw parallels with the 4K variant. Considering that this stick is roughly three-quarters of the price of the Fire TV Stick 4K, it’s not even close to 3/4 of the performance. While this TV stick has the advantage of external content playback via Micro SD, it doesn’t compensate for the irritating buffering problems.