Amazon's Kindle Fire Is a Hot Seller

Lots of big, smart, rich companies have tried to grab a piece of the tablet market dominated by Apple's iPad.  Most efforts have fizzled but Amazon's Fire is sizzling and its other Kindle products are adding fuel to the fire.

Without releasing exact figures, Amazon said Monday that it sold four times as many Kindle products on Black Friday this year as on the same day last year.

The $199 Fire, which features a color screen, has been its best-selling product for eight weeks, Amazon said.

Analysts quoted by The Wall Street Journal say Amazon may sell as many as five million Fires by the end of January while about 13.5 million iPads -- which start at $499 -- are likely to be sold during the holiday period.

Barnes & Noble's $249 Nook Tablet is also generating customer interest but no sales figures are available.

While the Kindle Fire's lower price makes it attractive, consumers appear to be more impressed with the Fire's design and features than with its price, as ConsumerAffairs.com found when we conducted a computerized sentiment analysis of more than 330,000 comments on Twitter, Facebook and other social media.

The only significant dislikes our analysis found were that the Fire does not have a camera or microphone, unlike the iPad.  

These comments highlight a significant difference between the high-priced iPad and its more affordable counterparts: the iPad is, for all intents and purposes, a full-fledged computer, lacking only a keyboard, while the Kindle and Nook are more specialized products, intended primarily to be used to download and view existing content.  

In other words, you could write your own book on an iPad if you wanted.  You can't really do that, at least not easily, on the Nook and Kindle.

On the other hand, all three devices -- the iPad, Kindle and Nook -- share a single advantage: they are closely tied to their parent companies' huge inventories of books, magazines, newspapers, games and other content.  Other manufacturers, including Motorola, H-P, Samsung and Research In Motion, sell a tablet and basically leave the consumer to figure out what to buy and where to find it.

Apple was the first to develop and, some would say, perfect, the end-to-end package but with Amazon and Barnes & Noble catching up, the tablet market is suddenly hotly competitive -- always good news for consumers.

---

Sentiment analysis powered by NetBase