Earlier this month we learned that the Chinese manufacturer Venztech has great plans for the European market as they now have an office in Netherlands and they recently acquired the brand TLBB (The Little Black Box) from it's previous owner.
And that is not surprising, Venztech has been the manufacturer the TLBB models from day one, it makes sense for them to take interest in the brand.

From what we've seen so far they will use the TLBB brand to sell OpenELEC-based versions of their best hardware (at least for now).
First they announced TLBB V8 4K, a device very similar to their own Venz V8 (albeit not identical, there are subtle differences) and soon they will also announce a new Mini PC called TLBB Cube based on the Amlogic S805 SoC.

As the name suggests, TLBB Cube is shaped as a tiny cube (just 8 cm) and it promises to deliver good file format support for movie fans.

TLBB Cube is powered by Amlogic S805 (quad core, Cortex A5, 1.5GHz frequency) with Mali 450 (quad core as well).
The tiny device comes with 1GB or RAM and with 8 GB eMMC 5.0 storage.
As for connectivity, TLBB Cube has 2 USB 2.0 ports, RJ45 10/100 Ethernet, AP6330 2.4GHZ WiFi 802.11 b/g/n and Bluetooth 4.0.

As mentioned above TLBB Cube is running OpenELEC pure Linux with Kodi Isengard on top and one thing worth noting is that Venztech/TLBB are one of the few companies to actually comply with Kodi GPL requirements.

TLBB Cube comes with a few interesting customizations made by the TLBB team:

• Auto-update: the device will download the latest updates on boot, automatically
• QlickPlay interface: making it easier to navigate through movies and TV shows (fanart included)
• Built-in TV guide
• CloudSync: you can save the device settings on the cloud and easily replicate those settings to other TLBB devices

My thoughts? It's nice to see a device that looks different, most of the time the devices we announce here have the same shape and it gets boring after a while ;-)
One thing that's always a concern with unusual form factors is the heat dissipation, but Venztech assured us that TLBB Cube has a large heatsink that keeps the CPU cool even under heavy stress.

Suggested retail price for TLBB Cube has been set at €89.95 for European customers. Might look expensive when compared to S805 devices we find on Chinese websites, but let's not forget that this price contains VAT and import duties and that the device comes with 2 years warranty.