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One question I currently have concerns remotes. My current Fire TV boxes (2nd Gen and 3rd Gen) both have RF (radio frequency) remotes. Most of my other devices (Sony Bravia TV, Spectrum cable box, DVD player, Roku, and probably others I'm forgetting) use IR (infrared) remotes. With IR you need to point the remote in the general direction of the device to make it work. With RF you can be in another room and it will still work because it is radio waves rather than light waves. In order to get my Fire TV to work with a universal remote I bought that is IR only, I had to buy an IR plugin dongle for the Fire TV. It works now with the universal remote, but it is rather slow to react compared to using the RF remote that came with the Fire TV. The Cube will come with an IR plugin dongle. What I'm not sure of is how the Cube will interact with other devices that use IR but not RF. Will it do so seamlessly? Will it be slow and clunky? No way of knowing until we get one and test it out.
Another major question is how difficult to set up the Cube will be. Programming a universal remote can be frustrating. Programming routines and scenes in Alexa is definitely frustrating and they don't always work because we don't understand the dos and don'ts. It was not clear that you shouldn't use similar sounding device names, else Alexa gets confused. For example, Bathroom Light and Livingroom Light are too similar and caused issues. I finally figured that out and changed them to Bathroom Light and Livingroom Lamp and now she doesn't get confused as often. With simple routines such a PITA to program, I fear that turning the Cube into a universal remote will likely take hours and hours and still never be totally the way you want it to be.
And one more thing that keeps coming to mind: I have intermittent issues with Alexa dropping out. Sometimes it is the Alexa servers dropping, sometimes it is smart devices dropping out, sometimes it is my WiFi (though rarely). This is not a major issue, but it can be frustrating. I've had Alexa say she can not communicate with a smart device, but when I use the smart device's app on my iPhone or iPad it works just fine. So Alexa still has many issues in the smart device control area. In a entertainment center setup like mine, I wonder just how reliable Alexa will be.
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