This is a guest post from my friend Steve with his honest review of the new Amazon Fire TV Cube.

I subscribe to a lot of streaming services – names many of you will already know such as Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Hulu. Sometimes this can be a headache given that not all of them are compatible with Google Chromecast, such as the aforementioned Prime, due to the fact that Amazon and Google are essentially competing for the same market. Last year I tried to solve this problem by buying an Amazon product called the Fire Stick, but unfortunately for me this product didn’t work out the way I wanted it to. That’s not necessarily Amazon’s fault because in all likelihood I just happened to be the unlucky sap who got the one defective model in the bunch. It would work for about five minutes at a time and then reboot itself, and it was so hot to the touch it wasn’t hard to see why. Happily Amazon took my return and gave me 100% credit back so I hold no grudges over it.

What I really wanted and needed was not another stick or dongle of any sort. I wanted a set top box that would give my television “Smart TV” functionality while properly dissipating the heat generated during operation so it wouldn’t constantly reset itself. For a time Amazon offered just such a device called Amazon Fire TV, but the reason I wound up with a Fire Stick was because Amazon had discontinued Fire TV while they worked on the next generation model of the product. I decided to wait it out until they were ready to release the product I wanted and needed rather than taking a chance on a refurbished Fire TV from a third party seller. After all why use last generation’s product when you can get all the new features of the next generation? Read More…