Amazon has essentially combined its Fire TV product line with an Echo Dot, and given it a cube shape:
The new media streamer first leaked after a report from AFTVNews last September. Amazon later confirmed that it was working on a device called the Fire TV Cube, but didn't reveal any details aside from that.
It turns out the original leak was spot on. The Fire TV Cube is best described as a shiny, cube-shaped version of the 4K- and HDR-compatible Fire TV box Amazon launched last year with an Echo Dot smart speaker built into it and IR blasters tacked on.
The device will be available for preorder on Thursday and formally go on sale on June 21. It'll cost $120, though Amazon is running a promotion in which users of its Prime service can buy the box for $90 this Thursday and Friday. The existing 4K Fire TV box costs $70.
Amazon Fire TV Cube retains the same quad-core ARM Cortex-A53, Mali 450 MP3 GPU, and 2 GB RAM as its smaller predecessor, but doubles storage to 16 GB.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Friday June 08 2018, @03:06PM (4 children)
I clicked thru, its not what I expected. I thought it was basically a boom box sized obese version of an existing shipping product the "echo show", sorta NeXT cube sized, which would look nice on my desk, so I can watch star trek episodes while "working". Instead its more of a merger of an echo dot as controller for a Roku settop or similar, so instead of spending 15 seconds clicking a remote control I can spend two minutes arguing with Alexa "God damnit Alexa, stop, I said play Star Trek City on the Edge of Forever not Moonman Notorious KKK".
Somewhat seriously I don't get the whole mindset of voice control because its failure rate is maybe 10% to 20% which is almost too frustrating to use. You have to be really careful using Alexa as a cooking timer, you tell her to set a timer to boil some pasta for nine minutes and she'll set a timer for ninety minutes. My experience with voice control is its too annoying for stuff I actually want to do but for WTF it don't matter its good enough, so home automation sounds like a total loss but asking for the weather forecast is fine if I don't really care anyway. So Alexa would be nice for a digital picture frame, but not for a streaming TV settop.
I suppose... I could simply plug the new device into a small HDMI input monitor and get what I thought it actually was...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Friday June 08 2018, @04:12PM (1 child)
All I really care about is a nice device for Kodi.
4K and HDR support are nice, but there are a few downsides to the Cube:
* Fire TV Gen 2 had more powerful ARM cores and GPU (except video?) than current, as far as I can tell.
* Amazon's device can now either spy on you or decide to kill unauthorized applications like Kodi. To my knowledge, they haven't done the latter yet, but it is a looming threat.
* No hardware decode support for AV1 [wikipedia.org]. That's not Amazon's fault (for example, it was recently noted that AV1 narrowly missed being included in ARM's latest video processor [anandtech.com]), and AV1 isn't in widespread use yet, but it could be annoying 5 years down the line (and I expect these products to last even longer than that).
It would be really funny if there is support for Alexa in Kodi (there might be, IDK). Thanks for processing my pirate streaming commands, Bezos.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 09 2018, @12:01PM
I'm waiting for the Odroid N1 to come out (expected in August last I saw). RK3399 with 6 cores of AMD64, 4 gigs DDR4, PCI expansion. Firefly has a nice RK3399 board, but they are expensive as hell and don't have the same level of community activity. Pine's RockPro board is RK3399 as well, but they use LPDDR3 and make a few other concessions for cheapness' sake, plus they're unavailable right now.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by requerdanos on Friday June 08 2018, @04:54PM (1 child)
Or perhaps this exact configuration is closer to that which was intended all along [wikipedia.org]:
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday June 08 2018, @07:50PM
That ecological niche is already filled by Facebook and Twatter