For the last three weeks, consumers have been purchasing Kindle devices at a rate of more than 1 million per week, Amazon said today.
The Kindle Fire tablet is the top-selling and most wished-for item across Amazon.com, Amazon said. Among Kindle devices, however, Amazon did not break out how many of those 1 million devices sold were the Fire, the Kindle Touch, Kindle DX, and original Kindle e-reader.
"Kindle Fire is the most successful product we've ever launched—it's the bestselling product across all of Amazon for 11 straight weeks, we've already sold millions of units, and we're building millions more to meet the high demand," said Dave Limp, vice president of Amazon Kindle. "In fact, demand is accelerating—Kindle Fire sales increased week over week for each of the past three weeks."
Limp said many Amazon customers are purchasing two Kindle devices—a Fire plus a Kindle or Kindle Touch.
The stats come several days after Amazon confirmed that it will release a software update for the Fire tablet in the next two weeks. Amazon said the upgrade "will improve performance, touch navigation, and give customers the option to choose what items display on the carousel."
That announcement came amidst a report from the New York Times that said an increasing number of Fire users were displeased with their tablet. The paper pointed to research from analyst Jakob Nielsen, who slammed the Fire's form factor in a recent blog post. PCMag's Sascha Segan, however, said in a response column that he "disagreed passionately."
The Kindle Fire is now the number-two tablet on the market behind the iPad, but Apple doesn't have much to worry about at this point, according to iSuppli. The firm predicted that Amazon will ship 3.9 million Kindle Fires in the last three months of 2011 to secure 13.8 percent of the market, while Apple will ship 18.6 million iPads for 65.6 percent in the fourth quarter.
In a recent meeting with JP Morgan analysts, Apple CEO Tim Cook and chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer suggested that the Amazon Fire might actually help iPad sales. The Kindle Fire, Nook Tablet, and other low-priced options might help introduce consumers to the tablet market, prompting them to eventually upgrade to more feature-rich devices like the iPad, the execs said.
For more, see How the Kindle Fire Could Deflate iPad 3 Sales. Also check out PCMag's full reviews of the Kindle Fire and the slideshow below.