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Comment by brianwillis | Hacker News Reader

I don't have high hopes for the first generation of any Amazon product. The original e-ink Kindle was expensive, slow, ugly, and had an extremely limited range of books. The original Kindle Fire was slow and buggy too.

In saying that, Amazon could very well be the best company in the whole industry when it comes to iterating and improving. The current e-ink Kindles are pretty extraordinary products. When Amazon commits to building a product, they don't just give up if the first few attempts don't pan out, unlike some of their competitors (I'm looking at you Microsoft Zune).

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Amazon's main edge over the competition (in more than just the electronics) has always been two things: price and convenience. I know many people (myself included) who have changed their purchasing habits because of Amazon Prime.

They're trying to do to digital goods what they did to physical goods, and so far they seem to be pushing forward quite well.

If you look at the Kindle device itself, it is made to be cheap. Even the entire "Special Offers" program is an attempt to focus on the rapid consumption of content. I'd argue that Amazon is one of the few companies that can successfully pull off a device with advertising baked in to the user experience.

The original Kindle was priced competitively for its day. It was better than all of the other e-readers of its time in almost every regard, and in the most important aspect, book selection, it wiped the floor of the competition.

I'm pretty sure it was mainly screen cost driving the price.

> When Amazon commits to building a product, they don't just give up if the first few attempts don't pan out, unlike some of their competitors (I'm looking at you Microsoft Zune).

Ironically, it was Microsoft the ones who knew how to iterate and never gave up (it is not good enough until version 3).

Well, if the Amazon phone runs the Kindle Fire OS, it won't truly be a 'first' iteration, so hopefully it will turn out pretty well. I'm not sure how difficult it will be for them to get 3G/4g working well, but it seems to me like that would be the most significant obstacle.

You couldn't pry the PaperWhite out my dead hands, I love it so much (as their 3 month wait-list also attests). If it took them some iterations to get there, it should be worth the wait.

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