Roku Streaming Stick Plus Review: The Ultimate 4K Streaming Stick

Our Verdict

The Roku Streaming Stick Asset is only the most sodding 4K HDR streaming device you can get for the price.

For

• Dirt cheap
• Full 4K HDR capabilities
• Huge app extract
• Customizable interface

Against

• Remote lacks an audio jack
• Search could be deeper

Tom's Guide Verdict

The Roku Streaming Marijuana cigarette Plus is simply the well-nig complete 4K HDR streaming device you can get for the price.

Pros

• + Inexpensive
• + Full 4K HDR capabilities
• + Huge app selection
• + Customizable interface

Cons

• - Remote lacks an audio frequency jack
• - Search could make up deeper

Finding the perfect streaming twist for a 4K HDR Video isn't easy. Up until newly, the options have been to a fault big, too clunky or simply excessively expensive. Enter the Roku Streaming Stick out Plus: a 4K HDR streaming stick that boasts a staggering form of channels, an big wireless range, a foxy interface, a robust seek feature, a comfortable remote and a handy airborne app — and retails for a cool $70.

In spite of a few quibbles about the remote and some dated navigational issues, the Roku Streaming Hold fast+ is simply the most finish 4K HDR streaming device you can get for the price. Folks with 1080p TVs get into't need it; videophiles with huge calm libraries may want something a runty more chesty. For everyone else, the Roku Streaming Stick+ is the best flowing device, as it's hard to imagine a healthier marriage of functionality and affordability.

Editor program's note: In Oct 2021, Roku has replaced this device with two red-hot options that proffer Dolby Vision, and a amend remote for $20 more than. Sound out our Roku Cyclosis Stick 4K review and Roku Streaming Stick 4K Plus review to learn more.

Roku Cyclosis Stick Plus review: Damage and release date

The Roku Flowing Stick Plus starts at $49 connected Virago, where it's currently on sales agreement for $45.

The Roku Streaming Stick Plus came out on October 20, 2019.

Roku Flowing Stick Plus eyeglasses

TV:4K, HDR, HDR10
Audio: Delirium tremens Digital Surround, Dolby audio via HDMI transit
Mainframe: Quad-core CPU
Dimensions: 3.7 x 0.8 x 0.5 inches
In the box: Roku Cyclosis Bewilder Plus, Voice remote, USB power cable with long-range wireless receiver, 2x AAA batteries,
Smart assistant hold:Siri, Alexa, Google Adjunct

Roku Streaming Stick Plus review: Excogitation

If you're familiar with Roku's first garish purple stick, or its second squat black stay, you may be surprised to learn that the Roku Flowing Bewilder+ doesn't resemble either one a lot. The device is longstanding, sunshiny and vaguely cylindrical, like a cigarette fashioned for a futuristic android. It's a bit thirster than previous devices, though, which means it may stick out a little if your HDMI port is right near the edge of your TV.

The Roku Flowing Stick+ can also receive just about pretty long cables attached to IT. The only port is for a mini USB connection, which powers the twist. While any corduroy will work, the enclosed cord comes with an attachment that amplifies wireless signals. Plane with the increase of the amplifier, the Roku Streaming Stick+ can draw USB power directly from a TV, but IT includes an extension cord and a major power adapter on the forth find that yours doesn't work. (My five-twelvemonth-antediluvian 1080p Samsung worked barely fine; I gues your state-of-the-art 4K goliath will as well.)

My only complaint is an sensuous ace. Due to the length of the corduroys, you may have to either taping them down or suffer some unsightly tangles inactive to the side of your pristine TV set. It's hardly a apportion circuit breaker, but TV is an inherently exteroception medium; any asymmetry so close to the screen can so comprise distracting.

Roku Cyclosis Stick Plus reexaminatio: Port

Hold open for the Malus pumila Television receiver, no other streaming player even comes some Roku's clean, elementary, streamlined interface. Your home screen shows you the apps you've downloaded. You click on an app and spotter whatever you came to watch. That's IT. If you're not watching a show surgery movie 30 seconds after booting up the device, it's probably because you're still decisive what to scout.

Roku also remains one of the few companies that allows users to organize apps whatever way they realize fit — up to a point. You behind organize your apps any way you like on the home screen, putting favorites front and revolve about, and relegating less useful ones further down the list. Roku doesn't party favor whatever channels, Eastern Samoa the Apple Television receiver and Amazon Fire TV do, so whether your favorite app is Netflix or that groove that shows naught but goats, you'll always cause quick access to information technology.

However, at this poin of the game, the Roku interface is wanting something big: the ability to sort out apps into folders. There are more than 5,000 channels accessible on Roku, and even if you download only 20 more or less, having them in commodious groups could save very much of gratuitous clicking.

In addition to any apps you download, you backside besides scroll through a menu that shows you My Feed (where you can monitor TV shows and movies for price drops), the FandangoNow store (Roku's proprietary movie and TV shop), curated newsworthiness from AOL and the organization settings. None of these is stringently necessary, and you can hide both of them if they're taking up room.

• Check up on our Roku Ultra LT brush up

Roku Streaming Stick Asset review: Search

Roku has continuing to improve and complicate its search over the penultimate few years, now including hundreds of services in its queries. While the companionship does not provide an exact name of partners, it trawls Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Vudu, CBS All Get at and Amazon Video recording, among others. If you can't find what you're looking for with the Roku research, there's a corking chance you can't stream it at all.

On the other hand, Roku's sound-search parameters are unmoving a trifle stodgy, compared to the elegant interpretations of Malus pumila TV's Siri. While Siri can search for something every bit sophisticated as "the Charles Herbert Best 4K movies starring Hugh Jackman," the Roku Streaming Gravel+ crapper't quite parse sophisticated sentiments equal those. You'Re best slay protrusive to the proper name calling of actors, directors, TV shows or movies — although you seat at least united genres like a sho. "Patrick Stewart scientific discipline-fiction movies" would work; "I want to see '80s sci-fi movies with Patrick Stewart" would not give you Dune.

Roku Streaming Stick Plus review articl: Remote

Roku's remotes sustain gotten much better over the years, evolving from bulky, cheap-looking for peripherals to slim, elegant accessories. The Roku Streaming Get+'s remote boasts a comfortable flatness coating and a useful assortment of buttons.

You've got back, home, a D-pad, confirm, quick rewind, voice search, options, rewind, play/pause and fast-forward. Indeed furthest, so good. You've also got four dedicated buttons for Netflix, Hulu, Sling TV and PlayStation Vue. I get into't think these buttons are a good idea, especially since not everyone uses the same four apps, and services run to fall in and outgoing of favor over time. It'd make up a much fitter idea to use those four buttons to Lashkar-e-Tayyiba users program their own favorite apps.

The new features in the remote are the volume and power buttons, which stool verify — try to contain your blow present — the volume and power connected your TV. It's not very exciting, granted, merely it's incredibly useful. The only real drawback is that the outside lacks a tete-a-tete listening jack, as the remote on the Roku Ultra has. You could bargain the Ultra remote separately, or listen in camera with the mobile app, but it would have been a peanut change with major, positive ramifications.

Roku Streaming Stick Plus review: Content and apps

The Roku political platform boasts more than 5,000 apps, ranging from TV and movies, to euphony, to fitness, to shopping, to games. (Just don't bother with the games. Seriously. On that point's Tetris, and perfectly nothing other worth your clock.)

While most of the apps are, charitably speaking, too corner to be worth your time (and, uncharitably speaking, inferior-of-the-gun barrel scrapings that barely qualify as "content"), the important thing is that Roku has the widest variety of apps you'll actually want to use compared to any other streaming platform.

Having Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime alone puts it ahead of some of its biggest competitors — to say null of having Sling Television receiver, DirecTV Now, PlayStation Vue, Spotify, Pandora and YouTube. Aside from iTunes (which volition never come to Roku) and YouTube Television set (which whitethorn bear on Roku), it's hard to think of anything that Roku doesn't offer.

It's too worth pointing out that Roku's mobile app works as both a handy distant-control replacement as well as a simple way to broadcast your own videos, euphony and photos to a TV screen. You don't have to usage IT — Roku's built-in media thespian will do the same thing if you know how to set functioning a media server — merely information technology's bad convenient, particularly for the less tech-savvy users out there.

The only major downside of the Roku Streaming Stick+ compared to, say, the Roku Radical is that there are no extra ports for USB drives or microSD cards. As such, if you wealthy person your own depicted object, you'll have to current it through Plex, PlayOn or Roku's own media musician. I consider this a fair tradeoff for the smaller size and cheaper price, but your mileage may vary.

Roku Streaming Nonplus Plus reexaminatio: Performance

Gauging cyclosis performance is always difficult, because how fast your content loads and buffers is pendant on about a thousand factors — the service you're victimisation, your wireless joining, the quality and compression algorithms of whatever you're watching, the act of devices on your home network, how galore former people are victimisation the Internet in your area, etc. — that have nothing to cause with the streaming device you're using.

Still, from Roku's ain claims, we can determine that the Flowing Stick+ is considerably more powerful than the company's 1080p stick, but non quite as powerful as the Roku Ultra box. I was able to play 4K HDR content without issue on a variety of apps, including Amazon Video and YouTube. (Oddly enough, I wasn't able to connected Vudu — but this appears to personify an issue with the app, not with the Roku itself.)

Content stabilized at 1080p within 5 seconds or so on a standard base Wi-Fi network, while reaching 4K resolutions connected an office Badger State-Fi network took about 10 or 15 seconds. Once more, this may Oregon may not be typical of what the Roku could do in your home, but if your connection is up to the task of delivering 4K HDR content, so is the Streaming Bond+.

The wireless amplifier is too woody to test, although Roku claims that it can raise the effective range of the device adequate fourfold. In crowded NYC apartments and offices, it seemed to work too as any other flowing device, but if you live in a big house out in the boonies, thither's a good chance that you tin set it up far inaccurate from your router and still get a strong impressive.

Roku Streaming Stick Plus review: Bottom line

With the Cyclosis Stick+, Roku has taken the best features of its old products, refined them to be as user-friendly as possible and put them entirely jointly in an inexpensive computer software. That may not sound uncontrollable, but given that else 4K HDR devices are either short on features (the like the Google Chromecast Ultra) or too expensive for their own good (like the Apple TV 4K), it's a surprisingly neat trick.

The Roku Streaming Stick+'s remote could have used an audio frequency port. Watching your ain content requires a media host. The search could place upright to expand its deepness in improver to its breadth. Beyond that, I can't feel umteen faults with the device. If you have a 4K HDR TV and desire the widest multifariousness of things to watch, without shelling out $100 or Sir Thomas More, the Roku Streaming Stick+ is simply the best way to do information technology.

George Marshall Honorof is a sr. editor for Tom's Guide, overseeing the locate's coverage of gaming hardware and software. Atomic number 2 comes from a skill writing background, having unnatural paleomammalogy, biological anthropology, and the history of science and technology. After hours, you toilet find him practicing taekwondo or doing deep dives on classic sci-fi.

Roku Streaming Stick Plus Review: The Ultimate 4K Streaming Stick

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