Amazon Kindle Fire sells 95,000 units on day one

Amazon and retail partners took 95,000 pre-orders for the first Amazon tablet, the Kindle Fire tablet on its first day, according to a digital marketing firm.

That's about a third of the 300,000 first-generation iPads Apple sold on its first day, but still impressive given Amazon is only shipping the Kindle Fire on November 15.

On Wednesday, Amazon launched its first and long-awaited tablet, the Kindle Fire, for $199. Though it won't be released until November, Amazon and select retail partners, like Best Buy, began taking pre-orders and expect to to have the product shipped out in time for the holidays.

Pre-sales of Amazon's three other Kindles launched this week, the $70 original Kindle, $99 Kindle Touch, totaled approximately $25,000 units.

 

eDataSource estimated these figures by tracking email purchase receipts in 800,000 inboxes. The New York-based research firm has a database of millions of email, Twitter and Facebook marketing campaigns dating back to 2003, though it's not immediately clear where this information derives.

The Kindle Fire runs a heavily modified version of Android, hooks neatly into Amazon's gigantic book store, and is designed for multimedia consumption and, more than anything, reading. Although the Kindle Fire offers about half the storage space of most other tablets on the market, Best Buy on Friday slashed the cost of the HTC Flyer from $500 to $300; the retail giant also recently knocked $200 off the retail price of the BlackBerry PlayBook.

Meanwhile Amazon has been marketing the Kindle Fire as an e-reader instead of a tablet.

This article, written by Sara Yin, originally appeared on PCMag.com and is republished on Gear Live with the permission of Ziff Davis, Inc.