Amazon Fire TV Cube 3rd Gen Review with Alexa

The Fire TV cube line of media streamers is Amazon’s premiere line up for media consumption. While the second-generation version was overpriced and had some shortcomings, hopefully Amazon can redeem them self this time.

Price

This media streamer isn’t cheap. Here in Canada, it’s priced at a hefty $190 and in the USA it’s $140. Let’s continue to see if it’s worth it.

The bottom of the media player has a soft coating to prevent any scratches from occurring if placed on a glass home theatre shelf.

On the back is HDMI in (for cable or satellite setup boxes), HDMI output, IR extender, power, a USB-A port (unfortunately not USB-C) and Ethernet port.

Some notes to be aware of. The IR extender is sold separately and in my usage the Cube works fine without it. The Ethernet port is unfortunately 10/100Mbps and not 1Gbps so if you have some very high quality content to stream over your network like on Plex, this is a bit of a limitation. Another bummer is that at this price tag, no HDMI cable is included, you’ll have to buy it separately.

The power wire is about 5 feet in length. Power consumption is unknown and isn’t even listed on the Cube’s developer page. This isn’t a big deal but something worth mentioning.

WiFi supports blazing fast WiFi 6E Tri-band which we’ll go over in more detail regarding streaming content over an internal network. However, this is ironic because if your WiFi signal is strong enough, this means WiFi will perform better than the Ethernet port.

There is Bluetooth built-in which means you can connect devices like a PS5 controller or headphones for private audio listening.

Powering everything is an octo-core processor with 2GB of RAM and according to Amazon this Cube is 20% faster than the 2^nd gen. But actual performance results is what matters, which is covered below. For internal storage, it comes with only 16GB. At this price 32GB would have been expected. I say that even though there’s a USB port because there’s a catch which I’ll cover further in the “Performance” section.

At launch the Cube is powered by Android version 9 with Fire OS 7 running on top of Android. This means it’s possible to sideload Android apps as I have. Since app availability will vary based on your region, Hulu isn’t available in Canada but I’m able to sideload it.

The Cube 3^rd Gen is only available in black colour.

Smart Assistant

Having Alexa as the built-in smart assistant means you can control a ton of smart home devices and even use it as a powerful search assistant for media content. For example, you can tell it to turn compatible smart lights on and off, media control such as “open Disney+”, “find action movies” and much more. With Alexa, you’re in pretty cable hands since it’s a powerful assistant.

Audio & Video

Video quality is incredible if the source of the content is right, such as original 4K HDR content from Netflix, Disney+ and more. Video is capped at 4K 60FPS with support for Dolby Digital, HDR, HDR 10, and HDR10+.

In case you run into the same issue I did, I found that on my LG OLED TV that the picture was too dark, once I turned HDR mode in the Cube settings to “Adaptive HDR”, the picture was much better.

Audio playback supports Dolby Atmos 7.1 and Dolby Digital Plus.

Profiles

Upon first turning on your TV and Cube, you’ll be greeted to select your profile. Only the main profile needs to be associated with an Amazon account, you can add more people simply from the interface without any other account.

Profiles allow for a more customised list of recommended content based on your watch history.

Inputs

Thanks to that HDMI input port, here you can select to switch to your cable or satellite setup box.

There’s also a media player option to play content from a plugged in USB storage device.

Find section

Here you can search for a variety of media by searching for a specific movie or TV show name or simply look up genres such as “comedy movies”. The search works incredibly well and will search through various apps and services such as Prime Video, Disney+, etc.

Of course, if you don’t want to type anything out, you can always just use Alexa voice commands which comes up with the same results as typing.

Home section

At the top of this section is recently watched Prime video content and most of the content throughout the Home section adjusts based on which profile is being used.

Just below the recent watch row are ads… Yes, what is a Fire TV device without ads? These ads vary based on sponsored apps to install, sponsored media content to watch and normal ads for buying a new car or toothpaste. This section is not welcomed at all, especially considering this media player isn’t cheap.

Moving further down is recently used apps and recommended content to watch, except the algorithm does not seem too accurate. Sometimes it will recommend content I’m interested to watch; the other half is random content I wouldn’t even consider.

Most of the recommended sections further down is Prime content, in fact there is an excessive push for Prime content. There’s a single section for Netflix content but nothing else from Disney+, Hulu, etc. Oddly there’s a random section for Paramount Plus+ even though I don’t have a subscription for their service.

Performance

In terms of navigating around, it’s lighting fast. Despite the large number of rows (mainly on the Home section) and thumbnails for content to watch in the Home section, the Cube doesn’t stutter at all.

In fact, opening heavy apps such as Netflix or Prime video is within 2 seconds or sometimes less. Disney+ usually takes several seconds to open on most other media players (not just Fire TV media players) but on the Cube 3^rd gen it tends to take 2 seconds. Another item about Disney+ on other media players is that navigating content quickly sometimes stutters (it’s possible Disney+ apps just aren’t optimized well) but on the Cube 3^rd gen navigating is smoother than other media players and just slightly slow.

It’s safe to say that the Cube 3^rd Gen is one of the fastest performing media players currently available.

Going back to the USB port, this is the first Fire TV Cube that supports an NTFS USB external storage, but it has limitations. I tried connecting a few external 2.5” SSD drives and the drive enclosures show the power light on, but the Cube can’t read them. Once I plug in a 32GB USB stick, it works just fine. I think the Cube can’t provide enough power to read the data from the external drives. This means your experience may vary. Another limitation is that video files I play with high bitrate such as 65Mbps or higher stutter or freeze. Low bitrate videos play fine such as content in H.264 or H.265 compression in mkv and mp4 format at a bitrate of 25Mbps or less. Content in either compression or file type at a higher bitrate will simply freeze the video but audio will continue to play, this means the read speed of the USB port on the Cube is rather slow. It appears Amazon put a weak effort into this USB port.

Continuing with some nerd stuff, let’s dive in to Plex performance for streaming videos over your local network. As mentioned earlier, the Ethernet data cap is rather limited for playing back large bitrate files, for instance when I try to play content at 4K FPS, H.264 compression in mp4 at 65Mbps, it stutters a lot. For Ethernet it seems to cap around 36Mbps video bitrate which is better than USB performance. Oddly if your WiFi signal is strong enough and you have WiFi 6 or 6E it’ll perform better than wired Ethernet, as I was able to play content at 45Mbps before Plex compression gave out.

Even though this is a media player, since it’s running Android, you can install some high graphic games such as Asphalt 8. It performs rather well with almost no frame droppage or stuttering.

Apps & Games section

Here you’ll find a collection of your installed apps and games. Since this device is running Android at the core, it’s possible to sideload Android apps (see this guide).

However, app availability will vary based on where you live. For example, I’m here in Canada so I’ll be able to search for Canadian based apps and install them, but apps restricted to the USA (such as Hulu) aren’t available, you can only obtain apps outside your region by sideloading them.

You can get more apps by manually browsing them, using the search function, and browsing categories. Since it’s based on Android, the number of apps available is tremendous.

Live section

This is a simple section with a collection of apps that allow for live streaming content. This is typically comprised of news, sports and live streaming service such as BBC Earth.

My Stuff section

Here is a collection of bookmarked content in my Prime Video queue. It doesn’t include other services such as Disney+ or Netflix, it’s limited to only Prime content.

Settings

Most of this section is generic settings for adjusting video, sound, adding more devices to sync with the Cube remote, etc.

One interesting item here is the ability to turn on parental control to block certain types of content, disable purchasing and restricting videos.

Another item of note is data usage monitoring which allows you to cap data usage and limit video playback quality. This is especially useful for people that have limited data usage per month from their ISP.

Conclusion

The Cube 3^rd gen has a lot going for it. A nice interface, it’s easy to use, blazing fast performance, sideloading apps, and much more.

The negative points from the previous Cube carry over though such as ads being present in the Home section and lacking Ethernet performance. There was also a ton of potential with the USB port finally recognizing NTFS formatted drives, but it has trouble reading external drives and is slow to read data on USB sticks.

Of course, there are some other shortcomings but overall, this is a solid media player. Especially considering it behaves as a smart speaker Echo device too.