Hardware & software Performance and content Remote and Alexa In a nutshell, the Fire TV Cube has a built-in speaker and microphone for Alexa, better connectivity features, and more processing power than the FireTV 4K stick.
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All the control buttons are placed at the top. There’s volume control, a button to mute microphones, and a button to trigger Alexa or to enter setup mode (more on that later). Up top, you will also spot eight microphones that are always eager to catch the magic word “Alexa”. There is a LED strip along the edges that lights up in different colors in response to the action being performed. It glows in Cyan color when you call Alexa. Similarly, it lights up in white while adjusting volume, orange in setup mode, and pulsates green during calls. If it’s flashing yellow that means you have a notification and if it glows solid red that means your microphone is off. Clearly, in comparison to Fire TV Sick 4K, the Fire TV Cube is better equipped. The cube supports HDMI CEC, which enables you to control the TV via Cube’s remote or Alexa voice command. It supports both Bluetooth 5.0 and dual-band Wi-Fi for connectivity. As you scroll down, there are horizontal carousels listing down recently viewed or content recommendations from various apps but clearly Prime Video content gets higher priority. The Live tab lists all live channels according to your subscriptions. For us, it was able to list out live channels from Zee 5 and Sony Liv, however, it can’t list Disney+ Hotstar live channels. All in all, we are quite content with the new user experience on the FireTV Cube. With such aforementioned internals, the Cube feels much more agile than Fire TV Stick. We were able to switch between apps without pop-in issues which is something we encounter in most android streaming boxes (except Nvidia Sheild) and sticks. We were able to open Netflix then go to the home and then open Prime Videos in a few seconds. Thanks to the upgraded specs, the Cube can deliver 4K Ultra HD content with Dolby Vision or HDR 10+ at up to 60 fps. The Fire TV Cube manages to deliver stunning 4K visuals when contented to a stable network with speeds of more than 15mbps. We streamed several shows and movies on Fire TV Cube including in Dolby Vision and HDR 10+ and each time the result was nothing short of a visual treat. We revisited Stranger Things, Our Planet on Netflix and Grand Tour, and Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan on Prime Videos to check out FireTV Cube performance. During our review, we also tested HD and SDR content on the Fire TV Cube. The results were once again promising. It manages to upscale HD content for a 4K screen with a good amount of details and colors. Of course, the upscaling can’t match the crispness or vibrance of a native 4K feed. So how to adjust dynamic range settings on Fire TV Cube? Well, you news to open settings, then tap on display and audio section, followed by display tab. Now, you will find the Dynamic rage setting where you will have to choose Always HDR to Adaptive. Barring this small blip, the FireTV Cube manages to deliver some excellent streaming and viewing experience. In fact, we compared the playback with native apps on our 65-inch TCL P725 pre-installed apps. Differences in visuals were quite noticeable to everyone in the room. Coming to Alexa, it is the main attraction of Fire TV Cube. With Alexa smart assistant on board, you can simply ask Alexa to jump between apps, control your other compatible connected devices such as smart lights, and smart home appliances. I was able to ask Alexa to play specific content and it worked flawlessly most of the time. For instance, I asked Alexa to play ‘Ozark Season 2 episode 3’ and it was able to fire up Netflix and play it instantaneously. Similarly, when I asked Alexa to play Scam 1992, it managed to play it on Sony Liv. We could also successfully command it to play Mandalorian on Disney+ Hotstar in a single command.
Reasons to buy:
Smooth performance4K HDR 10+ & Dolby Vision playbackSupport for Dolby Atmos CEC support for equipmentExcellent app library
Reasons to not buy:
PriceyNo HDMI 2.1 cable in the box
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