Science

Amazon Kindle Fire keeps racking up preorders

The tablet continues to get tens of thousands of preorders, but is it really threatening to match the kind of demand that Apple's iPad has seen?

Brooke Crothers Former CNET contributor

Brooke Crothers writes about mobile computer systems, including laptops, tablets, smartphones: how they define the computing experience and the hardware that makes them tick. He has served as an editor at large at CNET News and a contributing reporter to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. His interest in things small began when living in Tokyo in a very small apartment for a very long time.

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Brooke Crothers

Oct. 6, 2011 8:34 a.m. PT

2 min read

Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet continues to sell at a brisk pace, though it remains to be seen whether the gadget will match the torrid pace that Apple's iPad set.

In the six days after the first day of preorder sales, the Kindle Fire has been selling at a rate of about 20,000 units a day, according to eDataSource, a market research firm. This follows an eDataSource report on Monday that said Amazon sold an estimated 95,000 Kindle Fires on the first day of preordering. The Kindle Fire was announced on September 28, and Amazon began taking preorders the same day.

Over six days that comes to a total of about 215,000, according to Carter Nicholas, CEO of eDataSource, in a phone interview Wednesday. (95,000 sold on the first day plus 20,000 units a day for six days.)

But there are even higher figures being cited on a blog covering Google's Android platform. Cult of Android said Monday that the Kindle Fire was selling (on average) at a clip of about 50,000 per day as of Monday afternoon, citing a source within Amazon.

Cult of Android went on to claim that those numbers "make the Kindle Fire's launch likely to be the biggest tablet launch in history, beating both the iPad and iPad 2 in first month sales."

Taking into consideration that the source of the information has the words "Cult" and "Android" in the title, it remains to be seen if the Kindle will indeed outsell the iPad 2 by the time the Kindle hits store shelves November 15, as the blog presumes.

Apple sold one million iPad 2 devices in the first weekend of sales and an estimated 2.4 million iPad 2s in the first month of sales. That said, the Kindle went up for preorder on September 28 and won't ship until November 15, so there's plenty of time to rack up some pretty impressive sales numbers before launch.