Amazon took 500,000 pre-orders for its upcoming Kindle Fire tablet between Sept. 28 and Oct. 28 and may have may have sold a million more through retail partners during that timeframe, according to Carter Nicholas of industry research firm eDataSource.
Nicholas, who spoke with CNET this week, said his firm's projections for Kindle Fire pre-orders assumed that for "every unit sold on Amazon.com there's also a unit being sold to a Best Buy or Staples." He also said the price of the retail giant's first Android tablet, $199, meant some portion of customers were pre-ordering more than one device apiece.
"I think it resets the bar," Nicholas told CNET, referring to the Kindle Fire's price. "In our data, we're seeing people ordering two and three of them. That's not the majority of people, but it is showing up."
The Kindle Fire officially goes on sale next Tuesday and will be available at more than 16,000 retail locations across the U.S. Amazon's U.S. retail partners include Best Buy, Target, Walmart, Staples, Sam's Club, RadioShack, and Office Depot.
Amazon made the Fire available for pre-order in late September, racking up 95,000 sales on the first day the highly anticipated device was made available, according to eDataSource. Less than a week after announcing the tablet, Amazon was reportedly selling more than 2,000 units an hour, or upwards of 50,000 each day, and had received some 250,000 pre-orders.
Those numbers, if accurate, don't reach the benchmark set by Apple, which sold 300,000 of its first-generation iPad tablets when they went on sale on April 3, 2010. But all signs are pointing to the Kindle Fire being the first significant challenge to Apple's dominance of the consumer tablet market since kick-starting it with that first iOS-based iPad.
Thanks to an attractive price that's a fraction of that of the iPad 2 and Amazon's impressive lineup of content, apps, and services for tablets, the 7-inch Kindle Fire is tipped by many industry watchers to be the tablet challenger to Apple that pretenders like Motorola, Research in Motion, and Hewlett-Packard tried to build but failed.
Nicholas did caution against assuming all Kindle Fire pre-orders were created equally. He told CNET that it was possible "that Amazon would stipulate to a major reseller like Best Buy that if it is going to carry the Kindle Fire, it would have to order a large number of units, though these would not technically be preorders directly from consumers."
Amazon may also have another battle on its hands in the next few months. Barnes & Noble, its chief rival in the ereader market, has readied a tablet of its own for the holiday season. Barnes & Noble's Nook Tablet will go on sale just two days after the Kindle Fire, but at $249, will be priced $50 higher than Amazon's tablet.