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In a surprise move last week, Amazon announced an estimate of it’s average sales per week. I say it came as a surprise became it’s perhaps the first time Amazon has revealed sales figures. While we did know that Kindle Fire bested iPad at Best Buy and that Amazon had a record-breaking holiday season, we never had hard facts. And even now that we a million kindles are flying out of shelves per week, we still don’t know how many of them are Kindle Fire.

Amazon made the announcement last week and claimed that it was selling a million kindles per week, for the last three weeks. It didn’t mention exactly how many of the million sold per week are Kindle Fire and how many are it’s e-readers. But that may not be very hard to guess either. Amazon did mention that Kindle Fire is leading the sales at this point.

When Kindle’s sales sky-rocketed through the holiday season, it was quite obvious that Kindle Fire was bringing all this revenue to Amazon, since it rose to the top on BestBuy as the most selling product. But later, market researches claimed that Kindle Fire sales have finally slowed down. This current claim by Amazon, though, is quite the contrary. It shows that the sales have sustained and may even rise as we move on to the first quarter of 2012.

Kindle Fire doomed to fail?
This may not seem so, at this point. But analysts and reviewers have time and again pointed out a number of problems with Kindle Fire, including slow touchscreen responsiveness, a lot slower web surfing experience, lack of external volume controls or privacy controls and the book-reading experience not being exceptionally extra-ordinary. These analysts claim that either Amazon has to fix this soon or it’s popularity will sink, with consumers still having the option of shipping back the product to the company. Reviews on Amazon forums have also been mixed, not overwhelmingly positive. So as we move on to 2012, we shall witness the fate of one of the most rapid successes in tablet market – can Amazon take the criticism and evolve it’s device into something better or the success bubble will burst at the right time.

Image courtesy TAKA

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