When the Kindle Fire Tablet was first announced for pre-release order back in late September, the 7 inch color touchscreen tablet immediately pre-sold 95,000 units the first day of availability. After five days that total hovered around the 255,000 mark. Many times when a tech device is first released it experiences a significant launch. Then sales numbers cool down. The Kindle Fire has done nothing but heat up however, and the company that builds Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet PC, Quanta, claims that they have already shipped nearly 4 million of the tablets to Amazon.
Industry analysts across-the-board were originally calling for an estimated 3 to 4 million of the $199 Kindle Fires to be sold in Q4 2011. After two weeks of continued sales support following the launch, those sales estimates from respected analysts were increased to 4 to 5 million units. With just about every full-featured non-Apple tablet being released this year given the “iPad Killer” moniker, the Kindle Fire is the only tablet thus far which has come close to earning that title.
Buy the Kindle Fire for $199.
Online tech news site DigiTimes has reported that their research indicates that production orders placed by Amazon with Quanta going forward have also been increased. That data received support from online research company iSuppli, which estimates that approximately 3.9 million Kindle Fire tablets will be sold in the fourth quarter of 2011. Should all of those lofty estimates hold true, the Kindle Fire Tablet would have leapfrogged the sales numbers of every other Android tablet this year after having only been available for three months.
Amazon’s Kindle Fire is unique in several ways. 
Amazon adopted the 7 inch screen size and eschewed the much more popular 10 inch display, there is no microSD slot for storage expansion (much like the Apple iPad 2), and there are no cameras on the Kindle Fire. However, the 7 inch color touchscreen tablet arrives at a retail price $150 to $250 below the entry-level prices of their competition.
Buy the Kindle Fire for $199.
And though there are only 8 GB of onboard storage space, Amazon offers free lifetime Cloud Storage of all Amazon content, effectively giving the device unlimited storage capacity. Amazon is also including a free 30 day trial period of their Prime Membership with every Amazon Kindle Fire purchase, which delivers streaming video and offers free shipping on all products ordered from their retail website.
The Amazon strategy has long been to release hardware at a breakeven or small loss, and make their profits off of low-priced but high-margin content, and it appears the same marketing strategy is not only in effect here, but has proven successful again with the Kindle Fire. Learn more in our detailed Kindle Fire Review.
