Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) said its Kindle Fire tablet was its best seller on Amazon.com on Black Friday, as the company reported the best sales ever for its Kindle family of electronic reader devices.
Per protocol, Amazon declined to break down specific sales figures for all of its Kindles, which collectively sold millions and four times the number of Kindles shipped on Black Friday in 2010.
The Kindle family was refreshed beginning in September with a $79 base model, the $99 Kindle Touch, a Kindle Touch 3G for $149 and the Kindle Fire for $199, whose price and other features helped the slate become the best-selling product across Amazon since it became available for presale Sept. 28.
The tablet, which runs a custom Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android build, boasts a 7-inch display and delivers content via the Silk Web browser that shares content processing with Amazon’s cloud, was also the top seller at Target on Black Friday.
Dave Limp, vice president for Amazon Kindle, said Amazon is seeing a lot of customers buy multiple Kindles to keep and dole out as gifts. “We expect this trend to continue on Cyber Monday and through the holiday shopping season,” Limp added.
Amazon made more than 18 million movies, TV shows, songs, books, games and other content available for the Fire from partners such as Netflix, Hulu, Pandora and Angry Birds. The e-commerce giant also offers free storage of Amazon digital content in the Amazon Cloud.
Also featured is Amazon Prime, a service that costs consumers $79 a year for free, two-day shipping and access to over 13,000 movies and TV shows from Amazon Instant Video.
In addition, consumers may access Amazon’s Lending Library, which lets Kindle device users borrow a book a month from thousands of book titles to read on their Fire or Kindle e-reader.
If Amazon is to challenge Apple’s iPad for mobile content delivery, it’s crucial that the Fire be a success. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster has said Amazon will sell 4 million Fires this quarter as the company prepares to launch a larger, more polished tablet in 2012.
eWEEK compared the the Fire with Samsung’s Galaxy 7.0 Plus and found the Plus outstripped the Fire in many areas, including performance of the Web browser and the ability to run apps smoothly. The Fire’s user interface showed some lag, and the Silk browser was not as powerful as we expected.