Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsHas some Features that I love, but huge problems with the device make it unusable.
Reviewed in the United States on July 22, 2018
I love the idea of this product - having an echo combined with a Fire TV, and there are some things I like about this product, but there are some very serious problems with this product that make it virtually unusable for me:
1) Terrible Wi-Fi connectivity – I mean, it’s really really bad. I’ve never had a media player with such a lousy connection to my router over Wi-Fi. I have many other fire TV devices including the fire TV stick 1st gen, the new fire TV stick with voice remote, the older 4K fire TV box, and the newer little 4K fire TV Square, and I’ve used them all on this same TV in this exact same spot in my house, and all of them have great connectivity to my Wi-Fi, i’ve never had an issue with any of them. But with my new fire TV cube in the same spot in my house, I get a terrible connection to my Wi-Fi. The signal cuts in and out, videos constantly pause and buffer, sometimes every few minutes for several minutes at a time. It’s so terrible that I can’t even stand to watch a video on the Cube, because it will pause every minute or two. This happens both on videos streamed over the Internet such as prime video and Netflix, and my own videos served locally from my own home computer, which tells me that this is not an Internet problem, it’s a Wi-Fi connection problem. I also have a Roku, AppleTV, and android TV box connected to the same TV in the same location, and none of them have any Wi-Fi connectivity issues either. I strongly suspect that Amazon knows that the cube has lousy Wi-Fi connectivity compared to its other fire TV products - which is why they bundled the normally very expensive Ethernet connection adapter in with the cube for free. No other fire TV device gets that ethernet connection adapter included in its’ package for free, and though I am really happy that the Cube does come with the ethernet connection adapter for free, it’s a very suspicious thing to do, isn’t it?
2) The device pauses any video you’re playing when ever you issue a voice command. So if I, say, just want the tv volume lowered a bit, the whole video I’m watching will pause, then the Cube will think about the vocal command I issued for a while (A lot longer than other echo devices), then a bunch of lights flicker on the cube, then eventually the TV volume is lowered, and then the video starts playing again. It’s ridiculously annoying. Using Any other echo device to Control my video doesn’t do this Pausing nonsense, I can use my dot, spot, and echo to pause and resume videos I’m playing without any issues, or issue any other commands to them without the video I’m watching pausing, so it’s kind of ridiculous to have to deal with this pausing nonsense on the cube.
Not only that, but though this pausing feature works the way it’s supposed to (ie pauses the video, listens to commands, then resumes the video) on some popular video streaming apps such as Netflix and prime video, in other (less supported?) video apps the feature doesn’t work right at all, so when you issue a vocal command to the cube while playing a video in one of these other apps, instead of pausing the video it completely stops playing the video and dumps you out of the video you’re playing, sometimes even dumping you out of the app entirely. This means that if you’re playing a video in one of these less – supported apps and issue a simple vocal command to the cube such as volume up, it will completely crash the video playback, and dump you out of the video app and back into the home screen. Then I have to find the app icon on the home screen again, wait for the app to start up again, find the video I was watching, play the video again, in some cases find my place in the video again, and then press play to start watching again, all just because I wanted the damn volume up a notch. This ‘pausing (and/or crashing) videos while issuing voice commands’ is ridiculous, and I can’t seem to find a way to turn that pausing behavior off. I have to be sure not to say anything that will wake up the cube to listen to voice commands while I watch a video, or I risk being dumped out of it and having to start the video all over.
3) I can’t find a way to adjust the volume of Alexis’ voice (thru the TV) independently of the TV volume or the cube’s own built-in speaker volume. I’ll explain what I mean - You can say volume up or volume down to the cube and it will adjust the volume of your television set, (or your sound bar, or whatever you’re listening to your videos through;) AND You can adjust the volume of the speaker built inside the cube by pressing the volume up and down buttons on top of the cube, (so when the cube wants to tell you something when it’s not connected to the television or otherwise needs to give you a sound, that volume can easily be adjusted, including Alexis’ voice through that speaker.) But, when I’m watching something on the television, and I issue a vocal command to the cube, when Alexa responds to my command, her voice is super super loud through the television. It’s so loud in fact that it makes my television speakers vibrate and hiss so much that I’m afraid it’s damaging them. But if I lower the TV volume to a level where Alexis’ voice is at a normal volume, I can’t hear my television program because the overall television volume is way too low. To put it another way - Alexa’s voice is so loud when coming through my television compared to anything else I’m listening to through my television that her booming voice sounds like it’s damaging my speakers, and the only way to lower her incredibly loud voice seems to be to lower the overall television volume, which makes any other programming I’m listening to on my television way too low to listen to. I’ve looked and looked, and I can’t find a way to lower the volume of Alex’s voice as it goes through the television independently of the main television volume, and she is just way too loud. If there is a way to lower just her voice as it comes through to the television without lowering the television volume overall, I would love to know what it is.
4) some of the main features that I use with my echo devices are not available on the cube for some reason, including voice calling, multi room music, and some other key features. These may become available in the future, but for now they are not available, and it’s very disappointing. It means that I have to have another echo in the room with the cube, which defeats the whole purpose of having both of the echo and fire TV functionality combined into a single unit and using the cube in that room. Since I have to have both an echo and the cube in the room in order to use all the echo features I use, Having the cube in here at all is pretty much useless. I’m really hoping that these features are added to the cube in a software update in the near future, because right now having a cube that cant perform these simple echo functions is very disappointing.
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Now, what I like about the cube. I would’ve easily given the cube five stars based on the features that I list below, had the issues with the cube that I listed above not been such a huge problem. It’s too bad, because these features listed below are really nice, and I would love to continue to use them with my fire TV cube, but as it stands now the problems with this device are so huge that I will probably have to disconnect it from my TV and stop using it entirely. Anyway, here are the features that I really liked about the Fire TV cube:
1) The ability to get things like the weather, information on local restaurants and services, news briefings, and other information played back as video on my television. It’s really nice to see my news briefing as video on the TV rather than just audio being read through an echo speaker, I love this feature.
2) Expanded device control through the cube. By mimicking your television, receiver, sound bar, and other electronic devices’ infrared remote signals, the cube is able to control far more devices in far more complex ways than any other echo device. The Lengthy IR blaster Cable that it comes with is really nice too, It lets you extend that IR remote mimicking to far more devices, including those hidden away in cabinets.
3) The cube still appears to be running the fire TV version of the Android operating system, which is a very powerful OS, and there’s a lot you can do with it. I really appreciate that even though this is a hybrid device that includes the Echo’s complex functionality, it’s still running on android as it’s backbone. Very very nice.
4) You could still go into the settings and allow the installation of apps from other sources (meaning sources other than the official Amazon App Store), which is a great android feature that really allows you to tinker with your fire TV cube and add a lot of functionality to it if you know what you’re doing. (FYI don’t use this to add apps to your Fire TV cube if you DON’T know what you’re doing or don’t know the source of your apps, that can be dangerous for your device. But if you have a lot of experience with this and know what you’re doing, this is a great feature!)
5) Though Amazon and Google are still having a stupid bitter childish battle which is negatively affecting both companies’ customers, and because of this Amazon was forced to remove the official YouTube app from their devices, you can still get the official google YouTube app from reliable sources and side-load it onto the new fire TV cube, just like you could with all the older fire TV devices. (Yes fire TV offers an alternative web browser based YouTube work-around, but it’s terrible. It’s really really bad. I don’t even bother with it.) It’s just really nice that Amazon hasn’t taken steps to somehow block this app from being installed, if you know what you’re doing you can still Side-load it onto your Fire TV Cube. (Ironically, you can find out how to do this by “googling” it. Ha!)
5) A USB port with OTG USB support is back!!! One of the major drawbacks of the fire TV sticks and the new 4K fire TV square is that they have no USB ports, and it looked like ‘no USB ports’ was going to be the direction that Amazon was going in for all of its fire TV products. But the fire TV cube has a USB port, yay!!!!! And you can connect a whole variety of USB stuff to it, just like you can to just about any other android device. This includes USB keyboards, mice, game controllers, flash drives, hard drives (that have their own independent power source), and a whole bunch of other stuff. Now that USB port IS a micro-USB port, and most of the stuff that you want to connect to the Cube will have a big old clunky full-sized USB connector, but this problem can easily be solved by getting a cheap little “OTG USB to micro-USB” adapter, and Amazon even sells them, (I bought mine on Amazon for about $3 including shipping for a pack of five). They are well worth the money, I recommend anyone who has a cube gets them. The cube even has separate MicroUSB and power ports, meaning you don’t have to use the USB port to power your cube, it has a separate little power port for that, so you’re free to use that micro USB port for anything else you want (The fire TV sticks and newer fire TV 4K use that micro USB port for their power connector, so you can’t use it for anything else unless you get a little “OTG micro-USB splitter” cable, but that’s another story for another day. For most customers, this means that on those devices the micro USB port is being used for power so I can’t be used for anything else.) but on the fire TV cube with that separate power and micro USB ports, you can load up photos, music, and videos onto a flash drive, put that little micro USB adapter in, and then plug it into your fire TV cube. The Cube even automatically mounts the flash drive, and treats it like another memory area that is supposed to be there, giving you access to the flash drive through your many fire TV apps.
6) The cube still appears to be able to control my smart devices such as my Wemo light switches and plugs. Somewhere in the cube description on the Amazon website it says something about it not being able to control smart devices without a hub, but that appears not to be the case for me, it still works fine with my Wemo devices.
Like I said earlier, I love these features in the new Fire TV cube, and if the darn thing didn’t have such a lousy Wi-Fi connection and didn’t pause/crash my videos every time a vocal command is issued to Alexa, I would’ve easily given this device five stars. It’s just that the problems that the cube has are so huge that they render the device unusable to me, and they are issues that I can’t seem to find a solution to. It’s too bad, because I really want to love this device, and I really want to use this device, but it looks like because of the problems listed above it’s going to get unplugged and put away in my closet. But If solutions to these problems are found through software updates or other means, I will be very very happy with my Fire TV cube.
