Amazon has never made a habit of providing precise sales figures for its Kindle line of products. But today the company made two major announcements indicating that the devices are selling like hotcakes:
- For the past three weeks Amazon has been selling more than a million Kindles per week.
- The Kindle Fire is at the top of the charts.
In other words, we still don’t know just how many Kindle Fire tablets Amazon has sold, but the retailer says it’s the number one best-selling product, the most gifted product, and the most wished-for product on Amazon.
Amazon currently offers a number of Kindle devices including:
- Amazon Kindle Fire $199 tablet for eBooks, music, movies, apps
- Amazon Kindle $79 eReader
- Amazon Kindle Touch $99 WiFi eReader
- Amazon Kindle Touch $149 3G eReader
- Amazon Kindle Keyboard WiFi $139 eReader
- Amazon Kindle Keyboard #139 3G eReader
- Amazon Kindle DX big-screen $379 eReader
So if we do a little math, all we really know at this point is that Amazon is selling more than 142,857 Kindle Fire tablets per week. That’s what you get if you divide 1,000,000 by 7, or the number of Kindles available.
But I get the feeling that the Fire is doing a little better than that. At the very least, I can’t imagine the Kindle DX is selling very well given its high price tag.
The 7 inch tablet is one of the cheapest Android tablets available with a dual core processor and a high-quality IPS display. It lacks some of the bells and whistles you get with competitors’ tablets, such as removable storage, a removable battery, or a microphone or camera. But overall it’s a pretty nifty little device for less than half the price of an iPad.
Hackers have also been making the Kindle Fire even more useful by adding support for third party software such as the Android Market, overclocking the device with custom kernels, and even completely replacing Amazon’s Android-based operating system with CyanogenMod 7. Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich for the Kindle Fire is also in the works.
This article makes a good point that we really don’t know how many devices of each are being sold. You could probably safely assume the Kindle Fire sells over 142,857 per week because the device is the most popular.Â
I’d avoid writing out the math as 1,000,000 / 7 because you are implying sales of the 7 Kindle models are somewhat even which may not be true.Â
Every corporation has paid shills whose job it is to post non-positive reviews on various sites.Â
They did it when the first gen iPad was announced. Â They’re doing it now.
I find it ironic that those who are fans of the iPad are deriding the Kindle Fire for the same deficiencies that affect the iPad… namely no SD card slot and closed ecosystem.
Yet, Amazon allows for the sideloading of apps not available on the Amazon App market.
It’s not a perfect product, but it is a nice first start, and much more usable and open than the nook color was (and still is).
I never believe media pronouncements of the death of products.
Apple has been declared dead yearly for two decades.
Desktop computers have been declared dead for the last few years.
I like my Kindle Fire fine. I had “right sized” expectations of it.My niece wanted one for Christmas, and her parents bought her one at Target. She saw mine, and wanted one.
So much for the idea that the Fire is the ‘Edsel’ of tablets (as the NYTimes referred to it).