- Walmart has some new streaming devices
for you to check out.
This is the Onn. Streaming Stick,
and this is the Onn. Streaming Device.
I don't know why they call it that,
we're going to call it the box today.
All right, so a stick and a box. How are they?
Now it took me a little while to pick these things up
at my local Walmart, because they kept showing up
as out of stock, and I didn't wanna order them online
for some reason.
Anyway, out of stock all the time, my word,
they must be great.
They're flying off the shelves, right?
Well, you know what else flew off the shelves?
The Furby.
We can't all be right all the time.
So today is all about deciding whether these devices
are worth a purchase from you.
Whether they're worth your hard-earned money.
So we're going to be talking about the devices themselves,
the remotes, the experience, the speed,
and the price of course.
And in the end we're going to discover
that one of these is an acceptable
low-end streaming device, and the other is kind of a joke.
So which one is which?
Well that's what we call it professional tease,
so you're going to have to stick around and find out.
Let's dive in.
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All right, let's get to it.
First of all, let's talk about
what you're going to pay for them
and what comes in the box.
The Streaming Stick comes in,
at least as I'm recording this,
at a price of $24.88.
When you open up the box you get the streaming stick,
you get a little HDMI extension just in case you need
that little extra room on the back of your TV.
It's got a power cable,
a remote with the AAA batteries included.
So everything you need to get started
with streaming on the device.
As for the box, it retails right now for $29.88.
You get the device, the box itself.
You get the remote and the batteries,
the HDMI cable and the power cable as well.
All packaged in these lovely neon avocado boxes.
As for setup, I went with the stick first,
I plugged the stick into the TV and oh boy,
did I have fun time trying to get that thing set up.
I'll talk about a few other things in just a moment,
but first let's just talk about the speed of it.
My word, it took a long time to set up.
Now I have pretty dang good wifi here in my studio.
I only mention this because at the beginning I had
to do an update right away
and it was about 600 or so megabytes, give or take,
and it took over 10 minutes just to download the dang thing
and then do the installation with the resets
and all of that.
It really took quite a long time.
And the experience with the remote didn't help,
but I'm going to get to that in just a moment.
When I plugged in the box, things went much, much smoother.
It took about half the time, maybe a third of the time
to get through the download of the update
and then the installation
and get through all of the reset.
Actually, you know what?
Now is a good time to talk about the remote.
Let's talk about it.
The remote is actually fine.
It's modeled on a remote that's used on
a few other Android TV boxes.
So you get all the usual bells and whistles,
the directional pad, the volume buttons.
There's actually a settings button, which I really like.
It's nice to be able to quickly get to the settings,
right from the remote without having to go to
the home screen, to get there.
And they've also included a few app specific buttons.
Right now these are hard-coded in.
So you've got YouTube, Netflix, Disney Plus and HBO Max.
So pretty standard apps, not a bad choice to go on here,
but unfortunately there is no way
to remap those buttons yet.
I'm sure some enterprising third-party
will figure out a way to do it,
but as of right now, you're not going to be able
to remap those buttons.
There's also a little TV button right here for live TV.
That takes you straight to, well, you guessed it
since this is an Android TV box, it's a Google product.
It takes you to YouTube TV.
It also has the Google search button,
so voice search is possible on this.
Of course that's standard nowadays, right?
And then one other button that I really liked
is this one right here.
It is a bookmark button.
So as you are scrolling through your menus,
you can hit the bookmark button and add that
to your Up Next list on your Android TV interface.
So all in all, not a bad remote.
And I'm even seeing people who are going online and saying,
I bought the device just to get the remote.
I like the remote.
I want to use it on my other Android TV devices.
So yeah, not too bad.
Unfortunately, the device that the remote
is connected to not so great.
Especially on the stick side.
So I mentioned earlier that
the setup process took a long time.
Part of that was because of the speed of the device itself,
and part of it was because of the difficulty
that I had entering email addresses and passwords
using this remote.
Now that's not the remote's fault, it's the device's fault.
So when I would try to type something in
I would get anywhere from a half second
to a three quarter second delay
from clicking the button to seeing movement on the screen.
Now that may not sound like much, a half second.
Well, you know when you're trying to type out
an email address or a password
and you're on your 30th character,
yeah it gets a little annoying.
And it's especially tough when you're navigating
a giant onscreen keyboard, and you're trying
to quickly go through and it's not registering every click
because the CPU is trying to keep up with how fast
your thumb is going.
It's very frustrating,
especially over the long-term.
Trust me.
Now, the box was a little bit better.
The box, I saw it usually about a quarter second delay.
And so it wasn't nearly as bad as what the stick was giving
me, but there was definitely still a delay.
So the device couldn't keep up with how fast I was going.
Now you can trust that with some other devices,
even some devices that aren't super high end.
You know, I'm not talking about the Apple TV or
the NVIDIA Shield or anything like that,
but you get the Google Chromecast, which retails
for 50 bucks. Okay, so twice as much as the stick
and a $20 more than the box.
And the Chromecast, it's like it's reading your mind
as you're trying to click through.
Right? It's so fast, it's so fluid
that you don't experience any delay.
It's very easy to use, very easy to click through.
This one, not so much.
But why the difference between these two devices?
Why the difference between the stick and the box?
Well, the stick comes with
a 1.5 gigahertz quad core processor,
and one gig of RAM.
Now three to five years ago,
that probably would have been enough for a streaming device,
and I wouldn't be complaining,
but nowadays, the way that these operating systems
are laid out and the way that the apps go,
you're going to need a little bit more juice than that.
So that's why it was taking a little while
for this thing to go.
The box on the other hand has
a 1.8 gigahertz quad core processor
with two gigabytes of RAM.
So it does have a lot more pick me up.
Like I said, there was still a delay when I was using
the remote on that thing,
but that delay is a lot less than what I saw on the stick.
And that speed by the way does translate
to the rest of the experience.
As you're going through the menus,
as you're opening up apps,
as you're playing your content
you will notice that the box is much
much quicker than the stick.
Now, of course the biggest difference is that
the box is a 4K device.
The stick runs things in 1080p.
Now you may not care about 4K versus 1080,
but the thing about it is the specs used
to achieve that on the box versus the stick are such
that the box is a much more pleasant experience to use.
It's much faster and much easier to use than the stick.
One thing that they both have in common
is that they're both Android TV devices.
However, the stick probably because
of those lower specs only runs Android 9.0.
The box on the other hand runs Android 10.0.
So there are going to be subtle differences there,
not huge ones, but differences nevertheless.
On the box side of things with Android TV 10,
they've cleaned up the interface a little bit,
removed a few of the extraneous icons,
cleaned it up so that it looks
a little bit more like what you would get with Google TV
on the new Chrome cast.
It's not quite that, but it does resemble that
a little bit closer than the stick.
But ultimately both of them are running Android TV
with no frills, no extras.
This isn't like the Chrome cast that I mentioned before.
It's also not like the TiVo stream 4K,
which built in their own kind of operating system
within Android TV.
Nothing like that.
It's all very, very standard.
If you've ever used Android TV,
then this is going to be very familiar.
As for the hardware, let's talk about the hardware
for just a moment.
Because frankly, when we talk about the hardware,
it's another reason why we see that the stick is
kind of weirdly extraneous.
The box is extremely small.
It's very tiny, fits in the palm of your hand.
But it has one weird design feature that, if it were me
I would have gotten rid of pronto.
On the box you've got the HTMI port on one side
and the power port on the other.
Now that might not seem like such a big deal,
but with a box like this if you're wanting to set it
on your desktop, you're going to have a cable coming out
of both sides of the box.
Which kind of means it doesn't really work for
a tabletop setup like you would have with other boxes.
You know, say your apple TV or your Roku Ultra,
something like that.
This isn't going to work very well because it's got
those cables coming out both sides.
So you're going to probably want to hide this box anyway,
so you'll get some 3M strips and stick it
to the back of your TV or maybe
the wall behind the TV, whatever.
So ultimately it's a bit like having a streaming stick
anyway because you're just going to want
to keep it behind your TV.
Aside from that and from the hardware
that we've already talked about,
you know, that's inside the devices.
I will just say that these both feel very cheap.
Which makes sense, I mean, 25 bucks and 30 bucks.
Light plastic that I could, you know, crush with my hand.
I won't.
So now we come to the question itself,
should you buy one of these devices?
Like I said, one of them is an acceptable,
low-end streaming device, and one of them is a joke.
Which one is which? It's probably fairly clear by now,
if you've been watching this review,
and that is that the box is decent.
It's okay, it's not great, but the stick is awful.
It's a joke. It's terrible.
And I definitely don't recommend that you buy it.
There's only $5 of difference between the two.
And with that $5 you're getting a quicker device
that's capable of 4K and gets you a step up on
the Android TV software.
That being said, it is still very much a budget device.
So even if you do go with the box,
you're getting a budget device that isn't as quick as
the competition and may not have
the software support going forward
that you would get with something like the new Chromecast.
So if it were me and you were going
for something you wanted to Android TV.
You wanted Chromecast.
You wanted that Google support.
Then I would see if I can spring the 20 extra bucks
and get the new Chromecast.
Which I love, I think it's a fantastic device.
However, if you are trying to save as much money
as possible, you just don't have that much to spend.
Then the Onn. box is a decent budget streaming device.
However, I just would not recommend the stick.
Scrape together the extra five bucks.
Skip the cup of coffee, do what you gotta do
and get the box instead of the stick.
But that's my take on it.
Of course, I want to hear what you have to say,
so let me know in the comments below.
And make sure you stick around for the Friday live streams.
I'm not sure if it's going to be this week or next week,
but I will give these away to a couple of lucky viewers.
Well, a lucky viewer and somebody who can tell me
if I'm right.
So if you're interested in getting your hands
on these devices, then make sure you're subscribed,
tune in for the Friday live streams every Friday
at 2:00 PM Eastern.
I'll be glad to see you there.
Thanks for watching everybody.
See you next time.