Amazon Kindle Fire sales could smoke Apple's iPad debut

The Kindle Fire is making good on analyst expectations that Amazon could be the first tablet producer to take a hefty slice of the tablet pie from Apple.

Cult of Android has gotten hold of a table said to be leaked from Amazon, showing the company to have, within five days, accrued more than 254,000 pre-orders for the Kindle Fire. Which would mean that Amazon is averaging an order rate of 2,000 units per hour, or more than 50,000 orders per day.

"If this level of consumer demand for the Kindle Fire continues," states the site, "Amazon will have 2.5 million preorders for the device before it officially goes on sale on November 15th."

That's a very big if.

Still, Apple sold 300,000 iPads on its first day (pre-orders included), and went on to sell 1 million units in its first month, while it moved 2.5 million iPad 2 tablets in that device's first month. Ifs aside, Amazon appears to be in excellent shape.

Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps has blogged that while the iPad knows how to work and play, the Kindle Fire is solidly a content-consumption device, good for emailing and Web surfing, and that she doesn't expect a big response from enterprise customers, who are tremendously helping to keep sales figures climbing. Forrester expects Amazon to sell 3 million Fire tablets this holiday season — the low end of its original estimate, due to the device's relatively late shipping date.

Neil Mawston, a director with research firm Strategy Analytics, appears unworried for the iPad. Though the Nook is another matter.

"We expect Amazon's Fire to put a sizeable dent in Apple's armor, but it will not be an iPad killer," Mawston told Connected Planet, following the Fire's debut.

"Barnes and Noble should probably be more worried than Apple," he continued. "The Amazon Fire can be used as a premium ebook-reader, and the Fire could quickly turn out to be a Nook killer."