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If you thought Amazon was the tablet marketplace’s best hope for a true Apple competitor, it looks like you were right. Pre-orders of the Kindle Fire continue to be brisk, and it’s already well on the way to becoming the best-selling Android tablet of all time.
Two weeks ago, more than a quarter million had been added to Amazon shopping carts — and during the company’s Q3 2011 earnings report, CEO Jeff Bezos made it clear that the early sales had exceeded expectations. Bezos announced that Amazon would be ramping up production to produce “millions more” of the Kindle Fire to meet the obviously strong public demand. If reports about Amazon’s initial order — which pegged the first run of the Kindle Fire at 5 million units — were accurate, the company is clearly anticipating moving the tablets at an iPad-like pace.
There’s certainly every reason to believe that Amazon will succeed where other Android tabet makers are failing. Recently we’ve seen several new models launch that try to compete with the Kindle Fire in terms of price, but they’re never a match when it comes to hardware. The Kindle Fire sports a dual-core TI Omap processor, where other $200-$250 tablets are shipping with single-core chips, and it’s also got a more capacious battery. Most importantly, however, the Kindle Fire is tightly integrated with all of Amazon’s services, from eBoobs to on-demand video and music in the cloud.
The Kindle Fire also has the slick Silk web browser on board that is sure to generate excitement once it’s handled by new tablet owners. And unlike the folks at RIM — whose BlackBerry PlayBook the Kindle Fire is modeled after — Amazon has made sure its tablet ships with a full-featured email client from day one.
Let’s just hope they make a move beyond the U.S. border some time soon. I’d love to get my hands on a $200 Kindle Fire here in Canada, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.
