When the Kindle Fire tablet was first announced in late September and began accepting pre-orders in October, the device immediately sold 90,000 pre-sale units its first day of launch. Its first five days an estimated 255,000 units were moved, and these numbers put the first Amazon tablet on a par with the Apple iPad and iPad 2 launches. With 4 million tablets ordered from their supplier, Amazon assumed they had enough for their initial pre-order sales run. Evidently, that was not the case, as Amazon just recently ordered an extra million tablets to help fulfill their supply demand.
In support of that, Amazon has added a “first-come, first-served” designation to the Kindle Fire touch screen tablet that retails for $199. Evidently Amazon is attempting to get out ahead of any customer shipping complaints. The popularity of the device is understandable, as previous to the 7 inch Kindle Fire tablet, the average entry-level price for a 7 inch or 10 inch tablet averaged between $349 and $599, depending on the manufacturer. Effectively lowering the entry-level price by $150 or more, while still allowing for a 7 inch color touch screen tablet and Android operating system, the Kindle Fire tablet is currently the most popular tablet on all of Amazon.
When they released pre-order access to the Amazon Kindle Fire tablet, Amazon continued to use a little different strategy than the competition. The most common and most popular tablets’ screen size before the release of the Kindle Fire was 10 inches. And almost every tablet that was released had at least one camera, if not dual cameras built-in. And while some other tablets offer less than 16 GB of onboard storage, the most popular tablets previous to the Kindle Fire’s release had 16 GB as a minimum amount. The Kindle Fire has no cameras, offers 8 GB of onboard storage, and has no microSD slot for storage expansion.
Buy the Kindle Fire for $199
However, Amazon is allowing for free and unlimited Cloud storage for all Amazon content, thereby effectively giving the Kindle Fire tablet limitless storage space, which would even trump the 64 GB offered by the Apple iPad 2 at $699. If the early sales success of the Kindle Fire is any indication, it appears that cameras on tablets are an oversold feature as well. Most every tablet buyer already owns some type of smartphone, which usually comes equipped with at least one camera, so Amazon chose to leave that costly feature out of its low-priced tablet.
