Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled the Kindle Fire Monday morning, announcing it would be available for pre-order online immediately. By Monday afternoon, the device had already climbed to the number one spot on the Amazon.com electronics bestseller list.
In fact, on the electronics “movers and shakers” list, which shows “the biggest gainers in sales rank compared to twenty-four hours ago,” the Kindle Fire and various versions of the new Kindle Touch and new $87 Kindle all occupied the top eight spots by Monday afternoon.
Those results were hardly unexpected, given the immense hype and interest in the Kindle Fire. But the intriguing question remains: Is Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet good enough and different enough to be able to make a dent in the iPad’s dominance of the tablet market?
“If it’s launched at the right price with enough supply, we see Amazon’s tablet easily selling 3 million to 5 million units in Q4 alone, disrupting not only Apple’s product strategy but other tablet manufacturers’ as well,” wrote Forreser Research Analyst Sarah Rotman Epps in a blogpost in April. “Apple will maintain a strong lead in market share, but Amazon will gain ground quickly and give product strategists from media, software, retail, banking, and other firms a reason to kick app development for Android tablets into high gear.”
Today, Epps updated her prediction to 3 million units, full stop, saying that due to the fact that the Kindle Fire won’t be shipping until November 15, it will likely sell on the low end of her original prediction.
Still, if the Amazon Fire manages to hit that mark, it will have come awfully close to the original Apple iPad’s record-setting sales figure of 3 million units in its first 80 days, a rate that earned it the distinction of the “fastest new technology adoption rate” ever, besting the DVD player, which took five months to reach a comparable figure.
And yet, it wouldn’t be near enough to dethrone the iPad’s latest, third quarter iPad sales figures, a whopping 9.3 million units between April and June. (That’s the combined total for sales of the original iPad, released in April 2010, and the iPad 2, which was unveiled March 2.)
The original iPad alone sold some 300,000 units during its first 24 hours.
But Apple has had two big advantages when it comes to selling the iPad, aside from any advantages conferred by the product itself: An international market and physical retailers. For now, the Kindle Fire is limited to U.S. customers and can only be ordered online at Amazon.com. We’ve contacted Amazon to ask if and when the Kindle Fire will be available in retail outlets where the e-ink Kindle 3 (Kindle Keyboard) is currently sold, including Best Buy and Target, and will update when we receive a response.
A report released on September 22 by tech market research firm Gartner suggests that Apple will maintain its lead in tablet sales through the end of the year and even over the next four years, into 2015, even accounting for its prediction of the Kindle Fire.
Gartner projects that Apple will have sold 46 million iPads globally when 2011 is all said and done, compared to 11 million Android tablet devices. (The Amazon Kindle Fire is based on a heavily-modified version of Android, likely Android 2.1.) Still, the firm notes that it would have projected even lower sales for Android OS devices “had it not been for the success of lower-end tablets in Asia, and the expectations around the launch of Amazon’s tablet.”
