Kicking Amazon’s Fire TV Cube, a $120 Mistake, to the Curb

Our Fire TV Cube just got exiled to the TV nobody watches.

If you’re not familiar with the gizmo, it’s Amazon’s attempt to merge the Echo (aka Alexa) with a streaming video player. It sounds like a great idea, and it sounded like a great idea to me when I bought one in June.

But as it turns out, it’s a crappy Echo and a crappy streaming device. And so the Apple TV has been returned from exile to retake its place of honor.

Why do I say crappy? Let’s start with why it’s a crappy Echo.

First, the sound quality is crap. That’s not surprising, because it’s small. It tries to compensate for that by playing sound on the TV sometimes. But as I’ll explain, it’s comically inept at that.

Second, it’s slow. I don’t know what kind of processor is in it, but clearly they cheaped out on the Echo device inside of it. It’s like there’s a double satellite delay back to Amazon HQ where it processes the speech it hears. The original, version 1 Echo I had (and now have again) in its place was wicked fast.

Then comes the TV challenges.

In theory, the Cube will allow you to give voice commands to tune to channels, change the volume, turn things on and off.

In theory.

The Fire TV Cube tries to control both the TV and the Cable box via an Infrared transmitter — effectively generating the same signals a remote control would. But there’s one huge, horrible, problem with this. This is known as “Open Loop”: it issues commands, but gets no feedback on what happened as a result. If it guessed wrong about what the TV was doing at the moment, or the cable box wasn’t paying attention right when the commands come it, things go off the rails.

Thus, when the Fire TV Cube tells the cable box to tune to channel 4, it has no idea if that actually worked. Heck, it has no idea if the cable box is on or not. It’s a coin flip whether it works. Same with the television. It’s like telling your toddler to do something, not knowing if the kid is in earshot, and then not bothering to check up on whether they’re doing it. That works well about as well as the Cube.

Worse, sometimes when you give the Echo commands (like, set a timer), it decides that the TV is on and that the Cube should respond through the TV and not its tinny speaker. If that’s not right (because it’s so incompetent at controlling the TV), it tries to play all its responses through the TV — which is turned off and not playing nothing. You just have to miss a timer / alarm once to decide you’d be stupid to trust it with any valuable tasks.

After you return to using the TV’s remote control instead of the Cube, and start using other Echos — you know, the ones that work reliably and quickly — to do all of your Alexa stuff, you realize there’s not a lot left for the cube to do.

OK, sure. You might get it to work where I didn’t. Heck, you might have one and it works fine for you. That’s great! But if you don’t have one, you’ve been warned. Save your $120. Buy an Apple TV. Or a Roku. Or maybe a Fire Stick.