Amazon Fire TV Cube (2nd Gen) vs Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max

Voice commands worked quite well on the Cube in testing, even with my voice going up against the TV audio. I could use Alexa easily, loading live TV and on-demand video through Amazon, Hulu, and YouTube. Voice commands let me pause and resume video, mute and unmute the TV, raise and lower the volume, and even enable and disable subtitles while I watched, all completely hands-free.

Being an all Apple household I have to say this device impressed me quite a bit. I purchased a Firestick Lite over a year ago to take with me for travel but it had a bit of lag and seemed to have network drop outs on hotel WiFi (I know hotel WiFi is less than desired but it was annoying). In December this device was on sale for over half off and I decided to try it out. This was after I had gotten the previous Firestick 4K which was a decent product but I found out it for whatever reason cannot get the latest software (but the "less capable" Firestick Lite can, baffling I know)

Well since voice recognition is on here as a metric I'll start there. You can't really have this and a different echo device in the same room because they will argue with each other over who's job it is to listen to you. Using this as an echo device for voice commands such as "turn on the lights" doesn't work as well with this device though because it has to first determine if you're asking it about your light bulbs or trying to find a show to watch. About 40% of the time it's pretty sure you're talking about some show or another and it pauses whatever you were watching and takes you to another screen to show you whatever it thinks it heard instead of turning off the lights so you can enjoy the show you're already watching

Amazon bundles the latest version of its Alexa voice remote with the new streaming stick. Aside from the usual playback buttons, there are also dedicated TV controls for power and volume. And you’ll also find four branded shortcuts for Prime Video, Netflix, Disney Plus, and Hulu. (These can technically be reprogrammed, but it’s quite a process

The (HD) color “seems right”, but it makes no sense to me that it should “forcibly lock” into a “Dolby Vision”-only state, when it will probably be playing far more HD (1080) content, AND the fact that I have no control over that “choice”, is (in my humble opinion) inappropriate. And, again, trying to resolve all of these, mostly crazy, issues with only the existing Amazon support model is mostly a non-starter. Those people don’t understand the more complex aspects of the technology (to which these devices may be attached), and a lot of this simply goes over their heads. The inability to open "real" tickets, and then have those tickets escalated up to higher tiers of (more skilled) technicians (and even to the coders who manage the firmware), makes this support model a nightmare for the customer

Want my advice? This is the worst piece of crap I've seen that's got a Google and netflix certification on it. Don't buy it. The Amazon fire stick leaves this shit eating dust anytime, it's just way much faster and works fine, despite me thinking FireOS and the Amazon AppStore to be inferior.

If the Cube can power toggle the TV once, it can toggle again. Trust me. - Would it really be so hard to incorporate a built-in ethernet jack? I realize the usb dongle is a hack you produced for the 1st gen unit, but you've got plenty of real estate in that giant shell and I know if you try hard enough you can squeeze it in. - IR blaster - did I mention this is terrible? Please at least include a multi-cord cable since nobody will be stashing their cubes in their cabinets (with their amps etc) if they are going to be using voice commands

I do wish the live channels could be arranged by preference, maybe there is a way and I just haven't figured it out. Here is what I am not crazy about, the menu or landing page. The Home, Find, Live in my opinion should be at the top of the page horizontal or vertical. This would allow for more apps to show as opposed to 6 and should simply scroll with no need to drop to an apps area (3 little squares)

Which meant that I could turn on my TV plus external sound sources. I subsequently ordered two more Cubes. On two TVs I have old Philips soundbars (two different models) and one TV is hooked up to a Yamaha receiver. In every case, I can either say "Alexa / Computer / Echo, turn on/off TV

All the episodes of Jack Ryan were available on prime , on my smart tv’s prime app this didn’t happen, only season 2!?! 2. Sound and video were improved even though I had supported apps on my smart tv, and I cannot begin to tell you how much improvement I saw on Dolby Atmos support, especially Disney Plus and HBO Max , which had the apps on my smart tv but their Dolby Atmos sound was much better on the fire stick max 4k! Also Dolby Atmos support on the apps on the smart tv wasn’t perfect as Disney Plus didn’t have that support (for a certain period of time until it got updated) until I upgraded to the Fire Stick 4k Max! Then I had the best possible support for audio and video! Multichannel PCM is technically better than Dolby Digital Plus but I much prefer Dolby Digital Plus because the decoding will be done by the bitstream transferring to the soundbar/receiver rather than the streaming device decoding the signal for you and sending it via PCM. Dolby Digital Plus can be louder and I just prefer it over multichannel PCM. Firestick 4k Max will pass bitstreams while Apple TV’s Dolby Mat decoder will only passthrough Dolby Digital 5

If you own a recast; ensuring it and the cube are on the same WiFi band, like normal, is about the only setup you need to do for that, and if you need to set it up then the prcedure is the same as how you did the setup before. I see where many want to know if Alexa can be turned off. Yes. Once turned off you can use the Alexa button on the remote to issue your desires instead of through the cube

NO TETHER - NOR PLACE TO ATTACH ONE There's not even a tether. At least in the old days if you were going to design a tiny terrible product you would at least have an attachable wrist tether and hope it would compensate for something. I would attach it to a larger lanyard - preferably one that glows in the dark and/or has an internal LED. THERE's ONLY ONE Just throwing this out there: Old TVS used to come with a PAIR of remotes