Amazon"s Kindle Fire tablet has been available for pre-order for about a week now on Amazon"s web site but if a new rumor is to be believed, sales of the 7-inch Android-based tablet are already blowing up long before the tablet is due to launch. Cult of Android reports they have received some internal sales info from Amazon. The charts show that the Kindle Fire has sold 254,074 units in the first five days since the product became available for pre-orders.
If true, that means that the decision to price the WiFi-only tablet at just $199 has been a hugely successful one for Amazon. If this level of pre-orders continues, Amazon will have sales of about 2.5 million units of the Kindle Fire before it starts shipping on November 15. Indeed, the tablet seems to be outpacing sales of Amazon"s new Kindle eReaders. The story claims that the new Kindle Touch (both the WiFi and the WiFi + 3G version) has only generated sales of 32,000 units for pre-orders in its first five days.
While these pre-order numbers for the Kindle Fire pretty much blow away sales of any of the other Android-based tablets, it"s still going to be hard to beat sales of Apple"s iPad, at least in the short term. The article states that when the iPad 2 was released in March, it generated sales of 2.5 million units in in its first month. Keep in mind that the cheapest version of the iPad 2 is over twice the price of the Kindle Fire.