Amazon has had a monopoly in the personal entertainment space for quite some time with their Fire TV devices. However, Google did try to counter this last year with their Chromecast running Google TV. Though sadly, it did not make its way to India like most Google devices.
Now thanks to Realme, we are getting a taste of the much-improved Google TV. The brand recently announced the Realme TV Stick 4K running Google TV with a not-so-hefty price tag. Coming in at INR 3,999, the Realme TV Stick certainly makes an impression and tries to eat into the Fire TV Stick 4K market.
We have been using the Realme 4K Smart Google TV Stick for a little over two weeks, and this product left us quite impressed. For a thorough take on this, please scroll down for our full review.
Key Specifications
Overall, the design is fairly straightforward. We have raved about it in length on our previous reviews of the Amazon Fire TV Stick and Mi TV stick. However, there are some negatives to this design, too, mentioned in the below sections.
The most significant highlighting feature on the Realme 4K TV Stick is the use of Google TV. This is the first streaming stick apart from the 3rd Gen Google Chromecast that runs this new OS build. Google TV is miles ahead compared to Android TV in terms of UI/UX, recommendation engine, and features. Here, the Realme TV stick gets a lively home screen with large thumbnails, recommendations from the apps you’ve installed, and more.
Since the product is launched locally in India, we get the option to load content from Netflix, Disney+ Hotstar, MX Player, YouTube, Prime Video, and Apple TV. In addition, the stick here runs the Google TV build based on our unit’s Android 11 and August security patch. So the stick has all the up-to-date software, but it will be interesting to see how Realme fairs with the updates over time.
The new UI feels snappy and responsive for the most part barring some occasional hiccups. The Realme TV stick is able to output at 4K resolution, as is evident in the product name. The stick gets support for HDR10+ but misses the support for Dolby Vision which is readily available in the competition. We did notice some heating issues on the stick, which can be attributed to the boxy compact design, something similar is present on the Fire TV 4K.
The remote also has a voice feature, using which you can summon the Google Assistant, which works like a charm. We want to add that this all is smooth on high-speed broadband internet, so make sure the connectivity at your end is good.