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Comment by fortran77 | Hacker News Reader

I'm so glad Microsoft is trying again in the Phone space. I wish Amazon would try again, too. It's nice to have choices.

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No. Microsoft is much better at handling an ecosystem than Amazon. As far as I can tell, MS is using standard Android with Google Play Services(?) Amazon was trying to create its own ecosystem.

Amazon has a nice suite of services. A phone that has Music, Books, Shopping, Cloud Storage for Photos, and a few key apps (Uber, Lyft, popular games) but somewhat constrained otherwise, would be great for Seniors or people who don't need a high-performance general-purpose computer in their pocket.

How would that be any different than what they tried with the Fire Phone? You can already buy cheap Android phones that can do all of those things using either Google’s services or Amazon services

Perhaps, but I believe that not being able to install one or two crucial apps (e.g. banking) would be a deal-breaker for a good portion of those people.

> would be great for Seniors

How do seniors learn to use devices?

Mostly from peers or mostly from children? If from peers, how do they seed the ability?

I can't see how you could get seniors to start to use a "dumbphone" specific to them, unless the UI was spectacularly easy to use.

Agreed. Amazon is really experimenting recently with new form factors. It could be really exciting if there was a non-flagship phone from them in the future. What they should double down on is also making the Alexa experience the best.

Agreed. There is too little competition in this space. Having more choice would mean there wouldn't be the whole Google Services / Huawei fiasco. Apple and Google are effectively blocking competition in the marketplace.

It's an Android, so no new choice here, sadly. Google may even be insisting on Google Search as default, given the search bar's prominent visibility in Microsoft's promo material with the Google Search logo.

According to a consent decree with the EU, they can’t insist on it there. They could in the US I guess.

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