Editors’ Note: This is the most recent version of the Fire TV Cube despite the 2019 in title. Read our original review from October 18, 2019 below.
The first Amazon Fire TV Cube was one of our favorite media streamers, with all of the features of the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K, along with a far-field microphone array and infrared emitters to let you use Alexa and control your home theater entirely with your voice. The new, second-generation Fire TV Cube doesn’t try to tweak what the original already does well. It looks and functions identically, and has the same $119.99 price, but a faster processor makes apps load much more quickly, and support for additional HDR formats makes it even more flexible when streaming 4K HDR content to your TV. As such, it once again earns our Editors’ Choice.
Design
Physically, the new Fire TV Cube is identical to the first one. It’s a three-inch cube with glossy black plastic sides and a matte black plastic top, with the front face denoted by a translucent strip hiding a series of LEDs on the top front edge. The top panel holds Alexa, volume up/down, and microphone mute buttons, along with eight pinholes indicating the far-field microphone array. The bottom panel, lifted up slightly by four rubber feet, holds a series of grille holes covering the built-in speaker. The back panel holds HDMI, micro USB, infrared blaster, and power connectors.
The glossy sides of the Fire TV Cube conceal an array of infrared emitters that let the device work as a remote for any nearby home theater devices. An included infrared blaster, a tiny black plastic cube on the end of a lengthy wire terminating in a 3.5mm plug, can be placed anywhere that the Cube itself can’t reach with its signals.
The Fire TV Cube features dual-band and dual-antenna MIMO Wi-Fi compatible with 802.11 a/b/c/g/n/ac. If you want a wired connection, that’s covered, too; the micro USB port can accept the included Ethernet adapter, letting you connect the Fire TV directly to your router.
The included remote is also identical to the one that came with the first Fire TV Cube. It’s a thin, flat black plastic wand with a circular direction pad near the top, and a pinhole microphone and power and microphone buttons above it. Menu and playback controls sit below the direction pad, with a volume rocker and mute button below them.
Hands-Free Alexa
The Fire TV Cube’s most notable feature is its far-field microphone array for hands-free Alexa use. Just say “Alexa,” and ask a question or give a command. The Fire TV Cube will respond with its built-in speaker, and show any related information on the TV if it’s turned on.
It can also control your home theater devices directly with its IR emitters, and your smart home devices over Wi-Fi if they’re compatible with Alexa (and the vast majority of major home automation products are).
Media Streaming and HDR
On the media streaming side, Fire TV has a huge selection of apps and services, starting with Amazon’s own like Amazon Music, Audible, and Prime Video. You can also watch Crunchyroll, Hulu, Netflix, SiriusXM, Sling TV, Spotify, Tidal, Twitch, and YouTube, along with hundreds of others. In addition, the Fire TV Cube offers your choice of web browser, with both Amazon’s Silk browser and Firefox available.
While the new Fire TV Cube is almost exactly the same as the previous one in terms of features, it offers one notable upgrade in its media streaming capabilities: expanded HDR. The first Fire TV Cube only accepted HDR10, while the new model supports HDR10, HDR10+, Dolby Vision, and Hybrid Log Gamma (HLG). The additional HDR formats enable dynamic metadata in video signals, which can improve contrast performance in certain scenes.
Performance
Besides the expanded HDR support, the only real change the new Fire TV Cube offers is an upgraded processor. The original Fire TV Cube had a quad-core ARM CPU with clock speeds of up to 1.5GHz per core. The new Fire TV Cube bumps that up considerably with a hexa-core ARM CPU packing four cores at up to 2.2GHz and two more cores at up to 1.9GHz.
The first Fire TV Cube wasn’t particularly sluggish in general use, but the new model blows it out of the water. The new CPU makes a big difference in opening apps, switching between them, and navigating menus. While YouTube, Verve, and Pluto TV take four or five seconds to load on the old Fire TV Cube, they each open in just a second or so on the new model. Jumping between the apps and the Fire TV’s menu is also snappy and responsive, and videos load and play quickly. It’s a noticeable improvement in performance.
Faster Fire TV
The new Amazon Fire TV Cube doesn’t try to fix what isn’t broken. It looks identical to the previous version, and it doesn’t offer any significant new features besides better HDR support and a faster processor. Those two tweaks are welcome upgrades, though they probably aren’t enough to justify replacing your current Fire TV Cube with the new model. If you’re looking to upgrade your TV’s streaming interface, though, the second-gen Fire TV Cube takes an already fantastic media hub and makes it just a little better, earning our Editors’ Choice in the process.
