Amazon Reports Triple Sales of the Kindle During Holiday Season

Amazon Reports Triple Sales of the Kindle During Holiday Season

Amazon has reported that sales of the Amazon Kindle range of devices has tripled over the holiday season. Although Amazon do not report on specifics such as the amount of devices sold, they do comment that sales went extremely well.

“We are grateful to the millions of customers who purchased the Kindle Fire and Kindle e-reader devices this holiday season, making Kindle our bestselling product across both the U.S. and Europe,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com. “Our millions of third-party sellers had a tremendous holiday season with 65% unit growth and now represent 36% of total units sold.”

 Although Amazon had strong sales of the device, the main money is made from the content sold on those devices. Amazon works to very tight margins to keep the devices cheap and then makes up for it from the books, movies and other content that users buy. Some Kindles are also support by ads which also makes those a little cheaper to buy.

Rather than re-quote all the numbers from the earnings reported, take a look at TFTS that has posted a summary of the numbers.

We are unsure of the future of the Amazon Kindle Fire although rumours hint at a new version launching soon, perhaps with a same sized screen or possibly one closer to the size of the iPad. Amazon appears to have done well with the smaller 7 inch screen approach so they might continue along with what works rather than trying something they are unsure of.

source: www.gadgetvenue.com

Amazon has reported that sales of the Amazon Kindle range of devices has tripled over the holiday season. Although Amazon do not report on specifics such as the amount of devices sold, they do comment that sales went extremely well.

“We are grateful to the millions of customers who purchased the Kindle Fire and Kindle e-reader devices this holiday season, making Kindle our bestselling product across both the U.S. and Europe,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com. “Our millions of third-party sellers had a tremendous holiday season with 65% unit growth and now represent 36% of total units sold.”

 Although Amazon had strong sales of the device, the main money is made from the content sold on those devices. Amazon works to very tight margins to keep the devices cheap and then makes up for it from the books, movies and other content that users buy. Some Kindles are also support by ads which also makes those a little cheaper to buy.

Rather than re-quote all the numbers from the earnings reported, take a look at TFTS that has posted a summary of the numbers.

We are unsure of the future of the Amazon Kindle Fire although rumours hint at a new version launching soon, perhaps with a same sized screen or possibly one closer to the size of the iPad. Amazon appears to have done well with the smaller 7 inch screen approach so they might continue along with what works rather than trying something they are unsure of.

source: www.gadgetvenue.com

Amazon Likely Taking a Loss on Hardware While Aiming to Recoup With Digital Sales

Amazon Likely Taking a Loss on Hardware While Aiming to Recoup With Digital Sales

Amazon Likely Taking a Loss on Hardware While Aiming to Recoup With Digital Sales, An analysis by research firm iSuppli suggests that the IHS hell Amazon Kindle will likely be sold at a loss, a Seattle company, rather than hoping to make a Amazon.com customer who buys tangible goods as a means to shut down and profits ... iSuppli has conducted "virtual estimate" will be from what is available to the public about the components that make up the Fire Kindle. What they found was a razor-thin profit margins and expenses which may be above $ 10 $ 199 asking price tablet.

With that in mind, just how Amazon hopes to turn a profit with the Fire Kindle?

When all is said and done, the company's research shows that Amazon will eventually make about $ 10 average profit from digital sales. The ultimate goal, however, is "to create links between digital content and the navel retail environment that is more conventional."

Ultimately, Amazon hopes to create long-term buyer Amazon.com out of the deal, hoping buyers who make a profit by buying tangible goods such as shoes, clothing, diapers, etc. I think it's always proven that Amazon does not intend to make a profit off of the hardware itself, but I think they will perform significantly better with both Amazon Prime subscription, and purchase digital in general. I think the digital results in this report is a little too simple.

With the effort put into the Amazon securing digital content is good, I believe their main goal is to close the digital download, and hope that they can make a link to the Fire Kindle owners to do more shopping for the real goods on Amazon.com. It will be interesting to see how their strategy plays out. I personally think it is a great strategy - that only Amazon can draw successfully.

Amazon Likely Taking a Loss on Hardware While Aiming to Recoup With Digital Sales, An analysis by research firm iSuppli suggests that the IHS hell Amazon Kindle will likely be sold at a loss, a Seattle company, rather than hoping to make a Amazon.com customer who buys tangible goods as a means to shut down and profits ... iSuppli has conducted "virtual estimate" will be from what is available to the public about the components that make up the Fire Kindle. What they found was a razor-thin profit margins and expenses which may be above $ 10 $ 199 asking price tablet.

With that in mind, just how Amazon hopes to turn a profit with the Fire Kindle?

When all is said and done, the company's research shows that Amazon will eventually make about $ 10 average profit from digital sales. The ultimate goal, however, is "to create links between digital content and the navel retail environment that is more conventional."

Ultimately, Amazon hopes to create long-term buyer Amazon.com out of the deal, hoping buyers who make a profit by buying tangible goods such as shoes, clothing, diapers, etc. I think it's always proven that Amazon does not intend to make a profit off of the hardware itself, but I think they will perform significantly better with both Amazon Prime subscription, and purchase digital in general. I think the digital results in this report is a little too simple.

With the effort put into the Amazon securing digital content is good, I believe their main goal is to close the digital download, and hope that they can make a link to the Fire Kindle owners to do more shopping for the real goods on Amazon.com. It will be interesting to see how their strategy plays out. I personally think it is a great strategy - that only Amazon can draw successfully.

The Hardware Behind Amazon’s Upcoming Tablet Kindle Fire

The Hardware Behind Amazon’s Upcoming Tablet Kindle Fire

My Preliminary Thoughts

Let me just say that without spending some hands on time with the final product, it’s hard to say a lot at this point. What I can talk about, though, are the specs that we are aware of. Make no mistake about it, on paper Kindle Fire isn’t going to turn many heads or make many jaws drop.

There’s nothing groundbreaking about Kindle Fire when considering the individual pieces of tech that make up the device. However, I feel that judging the device on its parts, and not the sum of its parts would be a serious miscalculation.

It’s the entire device together, wrapped around Amazon’s forked version of Android 2.3, that will make Kindle Fire a success. It’s the friendly form factor, the even friendlier price, and the ridiculous amount of available content, that will make Kindle Fire such a compelling product to own.

Be sure to check out our corresponding software roundup, to see exactly what will drive the hardware that we just discussed.

Kindle Fire is an Android powered tablet from Amazon — creators of the original Kindle e-ink e-readers. Instead of using e-ink, which simulates printed ink on paper, Kindle Fire features a backlit display much akin to the iPad.

Want to see a full in-depth rundown of all of Kindle Fire’s hardware features?

Form Factor

Kindle Fire comes in a 7″ form factor, which allows one to grip it securely with one hand. It weighs in at a mere 14.6 ounces, making it easy to endure long usage sessions. The total dimensions for Kindle Fire are as follows:

7.5″ x 4.7″ x 0.45″ (190 mm x 120 mm x 11.4 mm).

Screen

The primary focus of Kindle Fire from a hardware standpoint, is of course, its screen. The screen on Kindle Fire uses IPS (in-plane switching) technology (just like the iPad) for extra wide viewing angles, and delivers 16 million colors. While it’s not quite a “retina” display, the overall resolution bests both iPads at 1024 x 600 pixels and 169 pixels per inch (pip). Like most touch screen devices these days, Kindle Fire features multi-touch, albeit the multi-touch is limited to just two fingers simultaneously. For durability, Kindle Fire uses Gorilla Glass, which is chemically strengthened to be 20 to 30 times stronger than plastic. In other words, it can stand up to occasional scrapes and bumps.

Processor

Kindle Fire comes equipped with dual core Texas Instruments OMAP4430 processor. The 1.2Ghz dual core processor is no stranger to tablets, as it is equipped in the BlackBerry Playbook, which, coincidently is pretty much the exact hardware that Kindle Fire is based on.

Interestingly enough, this same processor powers the Motorola Droid Bionic, and Motorola’s upcoming Droid RAZR smartphone. The chips contains a multimedia hardware accelerator that allows for Full HD 1080p encoding/decoding.

Memory

Like the iPad 2, Kindle Fire features 512 MB of RAM. True, that’s not exactly lot, and even some phone’s best that amount of RAM. Yet, if Apple has proven anything, it’s that 512 MB is more than adequate to yield good performance out of tablet.

Graphics

Kindle Fire’s graphics are handled by a PowerVR SGX540 3D graphics accelerator. The SGX540 has been proven to be quite adequate for mobile gaming, and it’s the same graphics set that will be used in Google’s Nexus Prime smartphone. That being said, the SGX540 isn’t exactly bleeding edge tech, being that it’ll be nearing two years old when Kindle Fire debuts.

Storage

All Kindle Fires come with 8GB of internal storage, with 2GB available for the modified Android operating system, and about 6GB allocated to user content. Amazon states that the on-board storage is enough for about 80 apps, along with 10 movies or 800 songs or 6,000 books.

For those wondering, Kindle Fire features no support for removable storage media like SD Cards.

The good news is that this is only half of the story. Amazon includes free cloud storage for Amazon Fire, which means all of your content purchased or uploaded to Amazon’s cloud storage is readily accessible anywhere you have a Wi-Fi connection. That means you can stream and download all of your content from Amazon’s Cloud Music service, resent and stream movies from Amazon’s movie catalogue, and of course tap into their massive ebook store. Amazon has adopted a new line of thinking, deciding to tap into their already robust Amazon Web Services (AWS) to accommodate for Kindle Fire’s relatively limited amount of on board storage.

As you may, or perhaps may not know, AWS provides storage and computing power to the majority of your favorite startup sites and apps. Amazon is therefore adopting a tried and true platform, using it as the basis for storage that is technically unlimited. Not only that, but there will certainly be third party content options that will allow you to stream and download content on the fly.

In a nutshell, Amazon feels like 8GB is plenty of on-board storage when you factor into the equation that they are hosting virtually all of your content in the cloud. Only time will tell if this rings true, but if anyone in this industry can pull off such a feat given their experience, it’s Amazon.

Connectivity & Sound

Amazon has decided to keep it simple in the area of connectivity. For one thing, there’s no concept of syncing with Kindle Fire. Everything is “synced” wirelessly; there is no iTunes-esque front end that manages your content; all content is managed from the device itself, or perhaps in a limited manner from Amazon’s website.

To handle the breadth of data, Amazon has decided to forgo the slow 3G options, and has instead relied solely on Wi-Fi for internet connectivity. The Wi-Fi is industry standard 802.11b/g/n with support for WEP, WPA, and WPA2 security measures.

For charging purposes, Amazon uses a USB micro-B connection. This connection can be fed to a wall outlet, or plug into a computer’s USB port for charging.

In terms of sound, audio is outputted through a 3.5 mm headphone jack, along with two top mounted stereo speakers.

Battery Life

Admittedly, Amazon has an uphill battle when it comes to competing with the iPad in terms of battery life. Apple’s tablet remains in the upper-echelon when compared to similar tablets, and that’s due to the fact that the device is essentially more battery than anything else.

Fortunately, it seems as if Kindle Fire’s battery is respectable, providing up to 8-hours of continuous life while reading, or 7.5 hours of life while watching movies. Granted those specs are with Wi-Fi completely disabled. Amazon says that battery life will vary when Wi-Fi is in use.

Obviously more items will factor into the real world specs when it comes to battery life — screen brightness, the type of content being used, speaker volume, internet habits, etc. We will have to wait until we get the device in hand in order to truly judge it in this area.

Once Kindle Fire has been totally depleted of its juice, Amazon reports that it will take approximately 4 hours to recharge.

My Preliminary Thoughts

Let me just say that without spending some hands on time with the final product, it’s hard to say a lot at this point. What I can talk about, though, are the specs that we are aware of. Make no mistake about it, on paper Kindle Fire isn’t going to turn many heads or make many jaws drop.

There’s nothing groundbreaking about Kindle Fire when considering the individual pieces of tech that make up the device. However, I feel that judging the device on its parts, and not the sum of its parts would be a serious miscalculation.

It’s the entire device together, wrapped around Amazon’s forked version of Android 2.3, that will make Kindle Fire a success. It’s the friendly form factor, the even friendlier price, and the ridiculous amount of available content, that will make Kindle Fire such a compelling product to own.

Be sure to check out our corresponding software roundup, to see exactly what will drive the hardware that we just discussed.

Kindle Fire is an Android powered tablet from Amazon — creators of the original Kindle e-ink e-readers. Instead of using e-ink, which simulates printed ink on paper, Kindle Fire features a backlit display much akin to the iPad.

Want to see a full in-depth rundown of all of Kindle Fire’s hardware features?

Form Factor

Kindle Fire comes in a 7″ form factor, which allows one to grip it securely with one hand. It weighs in at a mere 14.6 ounces, making it easy to endure long usage sessions. The total dimensions for Kindle Fire are as follows:

7.5″ x 4.7″ x 0.45″ (190 mm x 120 mm x 11.4 mm).

Screen

The primary focus of Kindle Fire from a hardware standpoint, is of course, its screen. The screen on Kindle Fire uses IPS (in-plane switching) technology (just like the iPad) for extra wide viewing angles, and delivers 16 million colors. While it’s not quite a “retina” display, the overall resolution bests both iPads at 1024 x 600 pixels and 169 pixels per inch (pip). Like most touch screen devices these days, Kindle Fire features multi-touch, albeit the multi-touch is limited to just two fingers simultaneously. For durability, Kindle Fire uses Gorilla Glass, which is chemically strengthened to be 20 to 30 times stronger than plastic. In other words, it can stand up to occasional scrapes and bumps.

Processor

Kindle Fire comes equipped with dual core Texas Instruments OMAP4430 processor. The 1.2Ghz dual core processor is no stranger to tablets, as it is equipped in the BlackBerry Playbook, which, coincidently is pretty much the exact hardware that Kindle Fire is based on.

Interestingly enough, this same processor powers the Motorola Droid Bionic, and Motorola’s upcoming Droid RAZR smartphone. The chips contains a multimedia hardware accelerator that allows for Full HD 1080p encoding/decoding.

Memory

Like the iPad 2, Kindle Fire features 512 MB of RAM. True, that’s not exactly lot, and even some phone’s best that amount of RAM. Yet, if Apple has proven anything, it’s that 512 MB is more than adequate to yield good performance out of tablet.

Graphics

Kindle Fire’s graphics are handled by a PowerVR SGX540 3D graphics accelerator. The SGX540 has been proven to be quite adequate for mobile gaming, and it’s the same graphics set that will be used in Google’s Nexus Prime smartphone. That being said, the SGX540 isn’t exactly bleeding edge tech, being that it’ll be nearing two years old when Kindle Fire debuts.

Storage

All Kindle Fires come with 8GB of internal storage, with 2GB available for the modified Android operating system, and about 6GB allocated to user content. Amazon states that the on-board storage is enough for about 80 apps, along with 10 movies or 800 songs or 6,000 books.

For those wondering, Kindle Fire features no support for removable storage media like SD Cards.

The good news is that this is only half of the story. Amazon includes free cloud storage for Amazon Fire, which means all of your content purchased or uploaded to Amazon’s cloud storage is readily accessible anywhere you have a Wi-Fi connection. That means you can stream and download all of your content from Amazon’s Cloud Music service, resent and stream movies from Amazon’s movie catalogue, and of course tap into their massive ebook store. Amazon has adopted a new line of thinking, deciding to tap into their already robust Amazon Web Services (AWS) to accommodate for Kindle Fire’s relatively limited amount of on board storage.

As you may, or perhaps may not know, AWS provides storage and computing power to the majority of your favorite startup sites and apps. Amazon is therefore adopting a tried and true platform, using it as the basis for storage that is technically unlimited. Not only that, but there will certainly be third party content options that will allow you to stream and download content on the fly.

In a nutshell, Amazon feels like 8GB is plenty of on-board storage when you factor into the equation that they are hosting virtually all of your content in the cloud. Only time will tell if this rings true, but if anyone in this industry can pull off such a feat given their experience, it’s Amazon.

Connectivity & Sound

Amazon has decided to keep it simple in the area of connectivity. For one thing, there’s no concept of syncing with Kindle Fire. Everything is “synced” wirelessly; there is no iTunes-esque front end that manages your content; all content is managed from the device itself, or perhaps in a limited manner from Amazon’s website.

To handle the breadth of data, Amazon has decided to forgo the slow 3G options, and has instead relied solely on Wi-Fi for internet connectivity. The Wi-Fi is industry standard 802.11b/g/n with support for WEP, WPA, and WPA2 security measures.

For charging purposes, Amazon uses a USB micro-B connection. This connection can be fed to a wall outlet, or plug into a computer’s USB port for charging.

In terms of sound, audio is outputted through a 3.5 mm headphone jack, along with two top mounted stereo speakers.

Battery Life

Admittedly, Amazon has an uphill battle when it comes to competing with the iPad in terms of battery life. Apple’s tablet remains in the upper-echelon when compared to similar tablets, and that’s due to the fact that the device is essentially more battery than anything else.

Fortunately, it seems as if Kindle Fire’s battery is respectable, providing up to 8-hours of continuous life while reading, or 7.5 hours of life while watching movies. Granted those specs are with Wi-Fi completely disabled. Amazon says that battery life will vary when Wi-Fi is in use.

Obviously more items will factor into the real world specs when it comes to battery life — screen brightness, the type of content being used, speaker volume, internet habits, etc. We will have to wait until we get the device in hand in order to truly judge it in this area.

Once Kindle Fire has been totally depleted of its juice, Amazon reports that it will take approximately 4 hours to recharge.

Welcome to Kindle Fire

Welcome to Kindle Fire

Amazon Kindle Fire now Present to you all, Kindle Fire Wire, is, as its name alludes to, a blog dedicated to Amazon’s upcoming Kindle Fire Tablet. Why did I decide to blog about a tablet, powered by Android no less? I’m blogging about the Amazon Kindle Fire for a number of reasons, but it basically boils down to these four simple words: I believe in it.

I honestly believe that Amazon has a hit on their hands here. Sure, the Kindles that have preceded the fire have always done fairly well from an analyst standpoint, but I think Amazon will be charting new territory with the Fire. I think that Amazon can reach near Apple levels of success here.

Is it because Kindle Fire is just that good, that powerful, or that much of a groundbreaking platform? Not exactly; it is Android powered after all, and the hardware is admittedly very BlackBerry Playbook-ish. No, what makes the Fire so compelling is a mix of a cheap price point — the cheapest we’ve ever seen a serious tablet competitor debut for — and the content. This is a content consumption device in the purest sense of the word, and Amazon has the content to back it up.

For these reasons, and others that I will share as the days and weeks go by, I have full confidence that Amazon will be able to compete with the iPad in terms of sales. It’s definitely not a replacement for the iPad, but Amazon isn’t trying to make Kindle Fire into an iPad replacement. Think of it as an alternative, a cheaper, yet competent content consumption device for the masses. The masses, masses.

Amazon Kindle Fire now Present to you all, Kindle Fire Wire, is, as its name alludes to, a blog dedicated to Amazon’s upcoming Kindle Fire Tablet. Why did I decide to blog about a tablet, powered by Android no less? I’m blogging about the Amazon Kindle Fire for a number of reasons, but it basically boils down to these four simple words: I believe in it.

I honestly believe that Amazon has a hit on their hands here. Sure, the Kindles that have preceded the fire have always done fairly well from an analyst standpoint, but I think Amazon will be charting new territory with the Fire. I think that Amazon can reach near Apple levels of success here.

Is it because Kindle Fire is just that good, that powerful, or that much of a groundbreaking platform? Not exactly; it is Android powered after all, and the hardware is admittedly very BlackBerry Playbook-ish. No, what makes the Fire so compelling is a mix of a cheap price point — the cheapest we’ve ever seen a serious tablet competitor debut for — and the content. This is a content consumption device in the purest sense of the word, and Amazon has the content to back it up.

For these reasons, and others that I will share as the days and weeks go by, I have full confidence that Amazon will be able to compete with the iPad in terms of sales. It’s definitely not a replacement for the iPad, but Amazon isn’t trying to make Kindle Fire into an iPad replacement. Think of it as an alternative, a cheaper, yet competent content consumption device for the masses. The masses, masses.