Amazon: Kindle Fire Sold Out, Has 22 Percent Of U.S. Tablet Market

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Amazon on Thursday announced that it has “sold out” of its Kindle Fire tablet for good — meaning the company won’t be restocking it at all going forward — a year after it debuted and a week ahead of a September 6 press event where Amazon is widely anticipated to unveil an update to its popular Kindle line of devices. 

Amazon also said that the Kindle Fire, which runs on a modified version of Google’s Android operating system, is its best-selling product in history and has “captured 22% of tablet sales in the U.S.,” though Amazon declined to specify exactly how many individual units it’s sold.

Still, if anywhere close to accurate, it would make Amazon the best-selling Android tablet in the U.S. by a large margin. Analyst figures seem to agree or put the Kindle Fire U.S. tablet market share even higher, at 28 percent according to one recent report.  

The Kindle Fire is also reported to be the second best-selling tablet globally overall, behind only the Apple iPad, which claimed over 69 percent of the market share in the second quarter of 2012, according to research firm iHS iSuppli (the same report noted that Amazon’s shipments of Kindle Fire for the same period gave it a 4.2 percent slice of the global tablet market). 

Updated to clairfy that iSupply’s figures refer to global tablet shipments. 

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