On September 28 Jeff Bezos announced the arrival of three new Amazon Kindles, the $199 Kindle Fire 7 inch color touch screen tablet, the $99 Kindle Touch Wi-Fi eReader and $149 3G Kindle Touch eReader. Speculation about a Kindle tablet had long been rampant across the Internet and the blogosphere, and a final announcement was well-received for two reasons. First, it is always good to get confirmation of the rumor of what looks to be a very good consumer electronics device. Secondly, the $199 price for the Kindle Fire 7 inch tablet drastically undercut the $400 and $500 entry-level prices for 7 and 10 inch tablets.
In a recent Kindle Fire teardown, it was discovered that the Kindle Fire actually costs Amazon $206 and some change to produce a single unit. So you and I can actually buy a Kindle Fire tablet for less money than it costs the CEO of the company that makes them. And that pricing has evidently worked for Amazon. Sales estimates have been all over the map, using different sets of metrics and informational research. However, the Cult of Android blog site says they received exclusive leaked screenshots of the internal inventory system Amazon uses to track sales that shows conclusively that 254,074 Kindle Fires were purchased in Amazon’s first five days of their pre-order sales launch.
If those numbers hold up, and continue through to the physical debut of the Kindle Fire on November 15, they will shatter the launch sales figures of the iPad and iPad 2 tablets. Amazon’s inventory management system is nicknamed Alaska for Availability Lookup and SKU Aggregator, and the cult of Android also says they show receipts from Alaska for the new Kindle Touch Wi-Fi eReader at 20,249 units sold, and 12,467 units sold for the Kindle Touch 3G eReader during that same time span. All efforts to confirm or deny the sales numbers through Amazon have been fruitless, and Amazon, much like Apple, very seldom comments on sales estimates or launch numbers.
Amazon has bravely left cameras off of their Kindle Fire 7 inch color touch screen tablet and released it in the 7 inch format that is in the decided minority of tablet models currently available. However, releasing at a retail price at less than half of what the most popular tablets are going for, with or without cameras, would seem to appeal to a wide demographic, and early sales estimates seem to back that up.
You can pre-order the Kindle Fire for $199
