The Amazon Kindle Fire does not have any cameras, does not have a 10 inch screen, and does not have a lot of features that the best selling tablets previously demanded. It also doesn’t have the hefty $399 to $599 price tag that the best-selling seven and ten inch Tablet PCs carry currently. What it does have is sustainable initial sales growth at a massive level, something that no tablet has offered since the iPad or iPad 2.
According to e-mail marketing firm eDataSource, 95,000 units of the 7 inch color touchscreen initial tablet offering from Amazon have been presold from Amazon’s retail website. The Kindle Fire presell launch occurred simultaneously to Amazon’s announcement of three new eReaders retailing from $79 to $149 and has set of the tablet marketplace ablaze.
eDataSource employs a rather unique metric to “guess-timate” sales of the popular consumer-electronics product. They use a test group of over 800,000 e-mail inboxes which allows them to analyze e-mail receipts when a customer makes an online purchase. Tracking Kindle Fire receipts, as well as receipts for the three new eReaders, they arrived at the 95,000 unit estimate for the first 24 hour period after launch. The three new eReaders totaled approximately 25,000 units sold during that same time. The Kindle Fire is available for pre-order for $199.
And while sales estimates are fine, actual sales data is obviously more important and verifiable. The Cult of Android online blog site claims that they have verified sources which provided them with actual screenshots of the Amazon “internal inventory management system”which Amazon calls Alaska (Availability Lookup and SKU Aggregator). They claim those screen shots show that Amazon actually moved 254,074 Kindle Fires in the first five days of their launch. That number supports a sales average of over 2000 units per hour, and 50,000 per day. How big of a number is that?
Sustained growth of the Kindle Fire at that level puts the $199.00 seven inch color touchscreen tablet on a pace to beat the one month sales figures for both the iPad and iPad 2 tablets. And if we know anything about Amazon, we know that every attempt that has been made to confirm or deny the sales numbers is going to go unanswered.
The Cult of Android website also says their leaked data accounts for 20,249 of the new $99 Kindle Touch Wi-Fi and 12,467 units of the new Kindle Touch 3G pre-ordered during that time frame as well. And using a totally unverifiable search metric that could mean absolutely nothing, UK web searcher Experian Hitwise said the search term “Kindle Fire” is currently twice as popular as the term “iPad”.
October 6, 2011 at 11:22 pm
Before you think of getting a Kindle Fire, here’s some limitations of it that you need to consider:
- Kindle Fire doesn’t have microSD slot that, for example, Nook Color has thus it is stuck with 6 GB usable internal storage unlike Nook Color that can get up to 32 GB card in. Kindles are made to be almost like a “dumb terminal” of the past to make sure you’re tied up to Amazon’s storage on the web (for which you need Wi-Fi connection to get to) and you can only store content you get from Amazon there, not other files. Quoting Amazon on Kindle Fire: “Free cloud storage for all Amazon content”. Get it, Amazon content?
- The stats of how long the battery can last (Kindle Fire theory is 8 hours) are taken with Wi-Fi off. You can only imaging how much less Kindle Fire battery will last if you use it to access content from their Cloud storage over Wi-Fi.
- Amazon can spy on your web activity through their new cloud-integrated web browser of Kindle Fire.
- VERY IMPORTANT – lack of microSD slot means that if you decide to root your Kindle Fire, you’ll have to root the actual device thus there will be no coming back. On Nook Color, you can make it boot from a “rooted” microSD card and if you want to get back to the original Nook you can just take out the card and reboot.
- Kindle Fire doesn’t have a camera.
- Kindle Fire has about 70% less usable screen area than iPad 2.
- Kindle doesn’t support eBooks in ePub format that is the most used format in the world.
- Kindle app store contains only Amazon approved apps and it does not include (and will not include) Netflix app that iPad has and Nook Color is getting thus again you’re stuck with Amazon content only.
- Amazon confirmed that you cannot download anything to Kindle Fire when traveling abroad.
I’d recommend waiting for a couple of weeks as Nook Color 2 is rumored to be released by Barnes & Noble.