Kindle Fire Could Be On Track To Outsell iPad in Pre-orders

Amazon Kindle Fire
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The Kindle Fire may be setting the tablet sales charts on, yeah…ok, you get it.

Amazon’s new, $199, full-color touchscreen tablet (actually just a RIM PlayBook running an old, heavily-forked version of Google’s Android operating system, coupled with Amazon’s suite of content and its new, cloud-based Silk browser), has reportedly earned 254,074 Kindle Fire pre-orders in its first week of availability, according to the tech blog Cult of Android.

The blog has screenshots to prove it, reportedly leaked by an Amazon employee who had access to the company’s internal inventory management system Alaska (Availability Lookup and SKU Aggregator.)

The post’s author John Brownlee notes that Amazon is moving Kindle Fires at a rate of 2,000 units every hour and 50,000 units every day, putting it on pace to have 2.5 million pre-orders by the time it begins shipping in mid-November.

According to an independent estimate from marketing firm eDataSource, Amazon sold a jaw-dropping estimated 95,000 Kindle Fire units in its first day of pre-orders alone.

For comparison, projections of the original iPad sold an estimated 120,000 units in its first day of pre-order on March 12, 2010. After that, it continued selling an average of 7,000 units each day, CNN Money reported, leading to 240,000 units by week two, a week before it went on sale in retail stores.

The iPad 2 wasn’t available for pre-order, but it sold an estimated 1 million units in its debut weekend March 12-14, 2011. It took the original iPad 2 8 days to reach that mark.

So if the Amazon sales projections are true, by several measures (pre-order sales per hour, total pre-orders in first three weeks), it could displace Apple’s iPad in terms of its pre-order tablet sales records. Cult of Android goes a step further, saying the pre-order sales put the tablet on track to best even the iPad 2 in terms of first month sales, which earned 2.4 to 2.6 million units.

And while the Kindle Fire’s new Silk browser has been turning heads (some of them for the wrong reasons, over privacy concerns), and the company is also bundling a 30-day-free trial of its streaming and low-cost shipping service, Amazon Prime, into the Kindle Fire, there can be little denying that the main attraction of the tablet to most consumers is its rock-bottom price: $199, compared to $499 for the cheapest new iPad 2.

Amazon is reportedly eating the cost of anywhere between $10 and $50 for every Kindle Fire unit sold, but that’s per the company’s “Gilette” strategy, selling the device itself to the consumers at unbeatable value while charging a (comparative) mint for the add-ons.

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