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Amazon.com on Monday announced it is shipping Kindle Fire one day early. The press release said it's "already the bestselling item on Amazon.com." Here are five tech writers with a range of first takes

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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos holds up the new Kindle Fire at a news conference during the launch of Amazon's new tablets in New York, September 28, 2011.SHANNON STAPLETON

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Jeff Bezos, chairman and CEO of Amazon.com, introduces the Kindle Fire tablet computer in September.Mark Lennihan/The Associated Press

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The Verge’s Joshua Topolsky – “Unlike the PlayBook, iPad, or pretty much any other tablet on the market, the Fire has no hardware volume controls, meaning that you have to go through a series of taps (especially if the device is sleeping) to just change the volume. The Fire also has no “home” button — simply a small, hard-to-find nub along the bottom used for sleeping and waking the device, and powering up and down. That means that Amazon had to create software navigation for getting around the tablet, which would be fine... if the home button wasn't always disappearing into a hidden menu. Also, I found myself accidentally pressing the power button when I was typing or holding the tablet in certain positions, causing the Fire to think I wanted to shut it down.” (Read the full review: http://bit.ly/u7kT4s)

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New York Times’ David Pogue – “The Fire does not have anything like the polish or speed of an iPad. You feel that $200 price tag with every swipe of your finger. Animations are sluggish and jerky — even the page turns that you’d think would be the pride of the Kindle team. Taps sometimes don’t register. There are no progress or “wait” indicators, so you frequently don’t know if the machine has even registered your touch commands. The momentum of the animations hasn’t been calculated right, so the whole thing feels ornery.” (Full review: http://nyti.ms/sHT51R)The New York Times

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Engadget’s Tim Stevens – “Battery life: This is one area where the Fire can't hope to compete against its Kindle predecessors that got the market suitably warmed up. Those readers, with their power-sipping processors and incredibly efficient E Ink screens, have longevity measured in months. We sadly have to resort to measuring in hours and minutes here, but we still have reasonably good news to report. In our standard video rundown test the Fire managed seven hours and 42 minutes. That's 12 minutes more than the seven and a half hours Amazon promises it can deliver when playing video, reaffirming our belief that there is truth in advertising. Sometimes.” (Read the full review here: http://engt.co/tKxZi3)

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A screencapture of Amazon's new Cloud Reader displays a user's Kindle library and an -in-app link to the Kindle Store.The Globe and Mail

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