Amazon Kindle Fire tablet Shipment Could Top 5 Million in Q4

October 14, 2011 By Sovan Mandal 9 Comments

Amazon is poised to sell no less than 5 million of its Kindle Fire tablet PCs in the fourth quarter, a figure that sums up to almost half of what the Apple iPad is projected to achieve. If this is how it indeed turns out for the Kindle Fire, then it would mean the first real competitor for the iPad is here.

“It’s the first time a competitor has emerged to challenge Apple and that’s literally from a standing start.” Apple is expected to ship no less than 12 million of its iPad in Q4.

What should be of more of an aggravation to the iPad camp is that the Kindle Fire has gained by about a million more Kindle Fires during the last quarter compared to what was projected earlier.

The figures are released by Ashok Kumar, an analyst at Rodman & Renshaw, which in turn are based on checks made with the Kindle Fire supply partners. “Checks indicate that they could ship upwards of 5 million units in the December quarter [fourth quarter], which is just shy of half of Apple’s volume.” The increase in sales forecast is being attributed to the unprecedented number of pre-orders that the Kindle Fire received, which in turn can being considered due to its extremely affordable price tag of $199.

The Kindle Fire received pre-orders to the tune of about 215,000 units during the first 6 days of its launch on September 28th with the formal launch expected to take place on the 15th of November. Also, if the initial lot of Kindle Fires live up to the comsumer’s expectations—which we all believe they can given Amazon’s reputation for coming up with bug free products—sales are expected to pick up even more, so that the 5 million sales mark in the fourth quarter definitely seems achievable.

However, as it has been the case with the iPad, supply constraints of the 7 inch display panels could effect Amazon’s sales.

“The primary gating factor is on the display side. If they can fix that…it’s not demand limited. It’s a supply constraint,” said Kumar.

via cnet

Sovan Mandal

Sovan Mandal is the senior tablet and tech corespondent for goodereader.com. He brings a international approach to news that is not just applicable to the North American market, but also Asia, India, Europe and others. Sovy brings his own writing flavor to the website and is interested in Science Fiction, Technology and Writing. Any questions, send an email

Ddh1969
All I know is that I had to be one of the first 150,000 or so to order so I better be gettin’ mine on time 🙂
Guest
Consider points below before buying Kindle Fire:
– Amazon confirmed that you cannot download anything to Kindle Fire when traveling outside US.
– Kindle Fire (or any other Kindle) doesn’t have microSD (or any other) card slot thus it is stuck with 6 GB USABLE internal storage unlike other tablets/ereaders that can get up to 32 GB card in to increase content capacity. Kindles are made to be almost like a “dumb terminal” of the past to make sure you’re tied up to Amazon’s storage on the web (for which you need Wi-Fi connection to
get to) and you can only store content you get from Amazon there, not other files. Quoting Amazon on Kindle Fire: “Free cloud storage for all Amazon content”. Get it, Amazon content?
– The stats of how long the battery can last (Kindle Fire theory is 7.5 hours) are taken with Wi-Fi off. It will last about 3 hours if you use it to access content from their Cloud storage over Wi-Fi.
– Amazon can spy on your web activity through their new cloud-integrated web browser of Kindle Fire.
– VERY IMPORTANT – lack of microSD slot means that if you decide to”root” your Kindle Fire (or any other Kindle) you’ll have to “root” the actual device thus there will be no coming back. On other devices you can make it boot from a “rooted” microSD card and if you want to get back to the
original Operating System you can just take out the card and reboot, and you can go back and forth between different images of various OS’s.
– Kindle Fire doesn’t have a camera.
– Kindle Fire has about 70% less usable screen area than iPad 2.
– Kindle doesn’t support eBooks in ePub format that is the most used format in the world.
– Kindle app store contains only Amazon approved apps and it does not include (and will not include) Netflix app that other tablets/ereaders have thus again you’re stuck with Amazon content only.
– Amazon says it will review every app in its Appstore for Fire compatibility, as part of an automated process. Rejected apps will include those that rely on a gyroscope, camera, WAN module, Bluetooth, microphone, GPS, or micro SD. Apps are also forbidden from using Google’s Mobile Services (and in-app billing), which, if included, will have to be “gracefully” removed. In terms of actual content, Amazon has outlawed all apps that change the tablet’s UI in any
way (including theme- or wallpaper-based tools), as well as any that demand root access (it remains to be seen how the company will treat the root-dependent apps already in its store) – this is what “rooting” can help with.