Amazon has a way of tooting its own horn without giving out specifics. Today the company announced that the Kindle Fire and Kindle eReader family has been awfully successful this holiday season, but we still don’t have exact sales figures for any of those devices. That said, here’s what we do know for now:
- Amazon has sold “millions” of Kindle Fire tablets.
- The Kindle Fire has been the best-selling product on Amazon.com for the past 13 weeks.
- The Kindle Touch and Kindle are taking the numbers 2 and 3 best-selling spots.
- Through the entire month of December, customers have been buying Kindle products at a rate exceeding a million per week.
- Kindle devices are also topping the charts in Amazon UK, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy.
There’s still not enough information in there to appease anyone trying to figure out if the Kindle Fire is outselling the Apple iPad 2, but it certainly looks like the Kindle Fire is one of the most successful Android tablets released to date.
That’s not surprising, since it’s also one of the cheapest models with premium features such as a dual core processor and IPS display. The Kindle Fire has a starting price of $199, while many other Android tablets sell for twice as much.
Amazon’s business model for hardware is different than that of most tablet makers though. Amazon can afford to sell the Kindle Fire at or below cost in hopes of making up the revenue on digital music, book, movie, and app sales.
The Kindle Fire lacks some of the features you’ll find on more expensive tablets such as GPS, cameras, a microphone, or removable storage. It also runs a highly customized version of Google Android.
But customers that don’t want to play in Amazon’s sandbox have already figured out ways to root the tablet and even replace the Amazon software with custom operating systems based on Android 2.3, Android 4.0, or even modified versions of Amazon’s Android-based operating system.
They said they sold 4 million Kindles; which includes the B/W $79 e-reader kindles. Out of that, they do not specify how many fires were sold. I can guarantee you the majority of those sold were not fires.