Kindle Fire Lights Up With Strong Pre-Orders

Pre-orders of Amazon's Kindle Fire reached 95,000 units on the first day of sales, suggesting a strong start for its entry into the competitive tablet market.

The Seattle, Wash.-based company's upcoming tablet isn't available until November 15, but market researchers are betting it will sell well based on these respectable, first-day online orders. The numbers may be an early indicator of success for Amazon's strategy of offering a full-feature tablet at a lower price point.

The Kindle Fire, which sells for just $200, enters a field dominated by Apple's iPad. With the least-expensive iPad selling at more than twice the price, Amazon is counting on lower cost to grab buyers' interest. Amazon is selling the Fire for less than the cost of manufacturing it because it provides a pipeline to users for sales of its movies, TV shows, songs, magazines, books, and other products.

That direct connection is courtesy of the Silk Web browser, designed specifically for Amazon's new tablet. The Silk browser connects users to Amazon's servers, rather than actual websites, and gives Amazon access to user browsing history, as well as IP and MAC addresses. Growing privacy concerns surrounding Fire and its proprietary browser, however, may cause some potential customers to hold off.

Fire's first-day showing doesn't come close to Apple's numbers -- iPad sold more than 300,000 units on its first day out --but the holiday rush is barely underway, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos predicted sales in the "millions" of units when the company launched Kindle Fire last week. Amazon's first-day numbers, however, are impressive in comparison to other tablet offerings, considering RIM sold only 200,000 BlackBerry PlayBook tablets in the whole second quarter.

Fire's competitors are already feeling the heat, and both RIM and HTC lowered prices on their PlayBook and Flyer tablets in anticipation of Amazon's product launch. Amazon just may come out ahead at the end of the year if the higher price of the Samsung Galaxy and other Android tablets affects those all-important holiday sales figures.

Kindle Fire Lights Up With Strong Pre-Orders originally appeared at Mobiledia on Tue Oct 04, 2011 11:20 am.

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