Mark Lennihan/Associated PressWhile the Fire is still featured along with the other Kindles on Amazon’s home page, it can be bought only from third-party resellers now. Amazon has scheduled a press event in Santa Monica, Calif., when it will unveil at least one and possibly more new models for the holiday season.
The debate over the new models is likely to be as spirited as it was over the old one. Amazon critics thought the Fire was vastly inferior to the iPad, even considering the much lower price of the Kindle. Amazon fans said the comparisons were unfair. Amazon noted in a Thursday news release that the Kindle received over 10,000 five-star reviews, which is more or less the approval rate among the first users last November. More than a quarter of the reviewers gave it three stars or fewer.
How the debate over quality affected sales is the great unknown. Amazon has always declined to reveal Kindle sales, and estimates have been all over the map. The company threw out a nugget on Thursday, saying the Fire had captured 22 percent of the United States tablet market. The statement is calculatedly vague, implying that one out five tablets sold last week were Fires but not quite saying that. Presumably Amazon had a higher percentage of last year’s tablet sales when the Fire was first introduced and has a somewhat slower rate of sale so far this year.
Forrester estimates that United States tablet sales were 24 million last year and will be 35 million this year. Squaring the two accounts we get somewhere around 6 million Fires sold. That is about what some analysts predicted just for the holiday season last year.
By the most generous estimates, then, it seems the original Fire did not live up to expectations. Amazon, as you may have guessed, had no immediate comment.