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So Far, More Than 50,000 Kindle Fire Pre-Orders Per Day
An anonymous reader writes "Leaked screens from Amazon's internal stock monitoring and assignment system (Alaska) has revealed just how popular the Kindle Fire tablet is already. In just 5 days of being up for pre-order there have been 250,000 reserved. That's more than 50,000 per day or 2,000 sold every hour. If that continues to launch day Amazon will need to have 2.5 million ready to ship to meet demand. To put that in context, the original iPad managed to ship 1 million in its first month."
The key phrase seems to be "if this level of consumer demand continues" — but given the success of the e-ink Kindle line, that might not be crazy. Do you want one, or not?
Apple essentially reinvented the market for tablet devices with the iPad. Which is a premium product being sold by a company with a reputation for premium products at a premium price.
Virtually every other major manufacturer looked at it, thought "Hey, we can do something similar" and started selling their product for about the same price - give or take maybe 5-10%. The likes of HP discovered the hard way that they do not have a premium reputation. But the Touchpad sale proved that actually there's huge demand there if the product can be sold not 5-10% cheaper than the iPad, but 50-80%.
Given the development time these things take and the sort of notice you have to give to a big factory to get thousands of anything, Amazon have probably been thinking this for some time.
The iPad 1 is $299 (yes, that's "refurbished," but many people believe that's just Apple's strategy for price discrimination since Apple "refurbished" products are indistinguishable from new).
That's the real competitor for the Kindle Fire, and with over twice the screen real estate, twice the memory, and an infinitely better selection of apps than are available in the Amazon Appstore, for most people the iPad is likely to be the better purchase.