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Comment by amputect | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you here; I was really surprised by the price tag, considering that over the course of a 2-year contract you're on the hook for another $200 worth of prime membership to get the most out of the features. I'm already on the edge of cancelling my Prime membership because of the problems with "2-day" shipping turning in to "3-5 day" shipping thanks to UPS Surepost being complete garbage, and I already have an Amazon Music player app on my phone. When I saw the price my enthusiasm dissipated completely.

The sci-fi firefly stuff is cool and very tempting, but I don't have a strong use case for it and it's not going to drag me out of my current phone ecosystem at that price point.

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Small correction: you get a year of Prime free with purchase of the phone, and if you're already a Prime member, they extend your existing membership by one year. This is way down the page though.

I'm really surprised that they didn't feature this information in the price displays themselves for existing Prime members.

That's not a small correction and it's worth noting, thank you for pointing that out! Yeah that information should be prominently displayed there. "This phone costs $200+contract and comes with $100 worth of Amazon Prime for free" is a much better selling point than "This phone costs $200+contract, just like every other high-end phone out there"

Yeah, but even including a year worth of Prime, that's still a very huge price tag for so little hardware, and an unproven software.

You aren't a soccer mom who loves Amazon and buys everything on there because it still saves them time (even if its 4 day free shipping). Amazon Mom says there's a huge market for this sort of stuff. These Mom's have phones.

Imagine the point in time where anyone with a fire phone firefly's EVERYTHING they buy, before they buy it. Cheaper from Amazon, and free "2" day shipping? Killer feature. Never pay more again.

Fairly powerful for price conscious customers. Add in Spotify at $10 a month, Netflix at $10 a month ($240 a year, over $500 over the life of a 2 year contract), and you are getting the entire phone for FREE if you already have Prime.

At total value, if you wanted to have a "similar" phone with similar streaming services and content providing, you'd be paying more than if you bought this $200 phone, with a data plan you most likely will already have.

Looking at it that way, Amazon is paying you to use their phone. Understanding how the Prime model works, this makes a shit load of sense.

Amazon Prime Music is in no way, shape or form a comparable feature to Spotify. It's 1 million songs versus 20 million.

Sure, but Prime Music is also only a few weeks old

And 400 of Amazon's 1 million songs are by Johnny Cash.

http://www.beyond-black-friday.com/2014/06/12/amazon-announc...

Such a temporary argument, especially when you consider Amazon has "increasing selection" as a core tenet[1] of how they grow any business they've created over the last 20 years.

[1]: http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/02/uk-careers/jfsfis...

The phone comes with 1 year of Prime at no additional cost. So it only costs you an extra $100 if you stay on the same phone plan and would pay for Prime anyway.

If you wouldn't pay for Prime anyway, the phone isn't very competitively priced.

I think firefly will be amazon's siri. Attractive, but not that useful.

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