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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: 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.