TV Stick, Raspberry Pi, and CHIP

I got an Amazon Fire TV Stick during the Christmas holiday season. It works well with my Amazon Prime account, and side loading stuffs such as Kodi or Bluetooth-keyboard is easy. But I can feel it is not very powerful when playing full HD movie. It lags from time to time, maybe from the video playing, or from the network streaming. Maybe this $39 stick is not as strong as its big brother, $99 Amazon Fire TV (not a stick).


I am wondering how a $35 Raspberry Pi would perform after installing the same Kodi and other software. The new Raspberry Pi 2 has the same price tag, but more powerful CPU, from 700MHz single-core  to 900MHz quad-core, and it supports 1080p full HD from very beginning.


Raspberry Pi has a traditional Ethernet port, and 4 USB ports. And the operating system supports bluetooth or wifi, but you have to buy the external dongles for those purposes.


The new (not-yet-in-market) CHIP is only $9, with a 1GHz cpu. It comes with bluetooth and wifi built-in. I like the concept that with bluetooth, you can remove USB ports, not like the Raspberry Pi, attached with 4 clumsy USB ports.


The Raspberry Pi supports old-style connection better, to be compatible with existing/inexpensive devices/technologies (I am not saying Bluetooth is not existing). The new CHIP gets rid of support of old stuff, to make it light-weight. They are both good designs.