Science

Amazon Kindle Fire shipments upped to 6 million in quarter

The Kindle Fire is turning out to be one of the hottest consumer devices of the season. And a market research firm has just boosted its projected shipment numbers for this quarter.

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

Nov. 18, 2011 4:09 p.m. PT

2 min read

A market research firm has boosted its projection for Kindle Fire shipments in the current quarter, as the Amazon tablet is proving to be one of the hottest consumer devices this holiday season.

"Our supply chain numbers are up to 6 million now," Richard Shim, an analyst at DisplaySearch, said in a phone interview Friday.

Shim said the timeline for manufacturer build plans was originally at 4 million units. "Shortly after preorders they upped it to 5 [million]," Shim said. "Then, about a week and a half ago as they were getting closer to the actual launch date, they upped it to 6 [million]." The Kindle Fire went on sale November 15.

This comes after eDataSource told CNET last week that preorder sales through Amazon continued to be very strong.

And the popularity of the tablet is already having an impact on other tablet suppliers, according to a report out of Asia. That report claimed that Dell, Asus, and Acer are planning to phase out Android tablets--though when contacted by CNET, Asus and Dell both subsequently denied that they're planning to exit the Android tablet business.

Apple's iPad 2 continues to be very successful, though, Shim said. Apple is pulling back iPad 2 orders for this quarter only because it's preparing to bring out an iPad 3 in the first quarter of next year, he said. Projected production numbers for the iPad 2 in this quarter will drop to 9 million from 11 million, Shim said.

That said, production has started for high-resolution 2,048-by-1,536-pixel panels for the iPad 3, which is due in the first quarter of next year, Shim said. Though the iPad 3's production numbers are unclear at the moment because of the challenges of making the high-resolution panels in large quantities, if production plans go as envisioned, the numbers could be 8 million iPad 3 devices in the first quarter, Shim said.