Koushik Dutta, a well known Android developer and member of the CyanogenMod team, offers a variety of applications that let people mirror their Android displays to TVs. The apps enable the functionality in devices like Apple TV, Roku and Google Chromecast. Since Amazon jumped in the ring last week, Koushik took the Fire TV for a test drive and found it to be the only set-top box that handled Android mirroring better than the rest.
Koushik’s mirroring apps don’t limit users to just photos, music or videos. They can mirror the entire display, meaning that just one app can enable users to mirror entire web pages, or simply play their favorite smartphone or tablet games on the big screen. Apple TV offers satisfactory performance, whereas the Chromecast only has decent video quality which gets tainted by the not so decent audio quality.
The demo that he has posted online clearly shows that Amazon Fire TV is a lot better than its rivals in this regard, that may partly be due to its hardware package which can better most mid-range smartphones. Fire TV has a quadcore Qualcomm Snapdragon processor coupled with 2GB of RAM.
So far Koushik hasn’t released an app update to add mirroring functionality for Amazon Fire TV. The new set-top box is only being sold in the U.S. for now, it costs $99 and is available for purchase right now through Amazon.