Amazon Kindle Fire Pre-orders Flame On, Expectations Run High

Posted 11/10/2011 at 11:45am | by Paul Lilly

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If Amazon's Kindle Fire fails to shake up the tablet market and pose a real threat to Apple's iPad, it won't be for lack of interest. Only a lack of execution can stop the Kindle Fire from being considered a huge success, because at this point, Amazon is on pace to move a lot of units by the end of the year, and the Kindle Fire isn't even available yet.

You can, however, pre-order a Kindle Fire device, and many people have. Millions, in fact. According to DigiTimes, Amazon now expects to move more than five million Kindle Fire tablets by the end of the year. That's up from a previous estimate of four million devices, which itself was up from an even earlier estimate of 3.5 million Kindle Fire sales.

Note that Amazon's optimism is based on pre-order sales, and they continue to remain strong, even after Barnes & Noble announced a $250 Nook Tablet with better hardware all around. More RAM and more/expandable storage are both points in the Nook Tablet's favor, and one that many geeks will undoubtedly find worth the $50 premium, but for mainstream users, do the upgrades matter? It's too early to tell, but based on the high level of interest in HP's TouchPad following the fire sale, it seems as though price is what matters most.

Amazon was also wise to announce Netflix support on the Kindle Fire, which up until yesterday was an open ended question.

Image Credit: Amazon